Not quite chamois, the weather forecast wasn't as I had hoped, so the plan had to change. I took the opportunity of the sunshine on Sunday afternoon to go to the Botanical Gardens.
I started off as always in the Viktoriahaus, this is my favourite part of the Botanical Gardens. I love the combination of the water plants and the shallow planters with the fish and shrimps.
The first two were taken with a 40-140 mm. Although not technically a macro lens, it is very sharp, and has a very short minimum focus distance of 70 cm, considering that this lens has the 35 mm equivalence of 80-300 mm.
M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 300mm 1:4.0 IS PRO
After coming out of the Viktoriahaus I switched to the 300mm with the 1.4x teleconverter and headed over to the pond. I was hoping to get a few shots of Damselflies, but I couldn't see any and thought that it was too early in the season. Anyway, I still took a couple of images of the pond.
What I should also point out is that all of these images are handheld, showing that the image stabilisation on the Olympus is impressive. To be able to get sharp images at this focal length with the speeds I was shooting at is amazing.
The first image has been reworked in Photoshop. There were some fine particles on the surface of the water, and some algae in the bottom left corner which I felt disturbed the image. I created a second layer on which I applied a motion blur and removed the elements of the primary layer that I didn't like to reveal the second layer below.
The second shot is a simple image of reeds against a bokeh background of the water surface.
I saw some movement to the right of me in the rocks and turned to see this lizard moving towards the water.
After this, I started to see a lot more movement. Other lizards appeared. This image has been cropped to remove some rock.
Then the insects started to appear.
And finally, I saw some damselflies. They were hovering around a small group of flowers in the middle of the pond. They tend to keep returning to the same perch, so it was just a case of waiting until the opportunity was there.
And one last damselfly with the added bonus of a spider on the other side of the leaf. This is a composite of two images, one with the damselfly in focus, the other with the spider in focus. As with the other image, I layered them in Photoshop and blended the two images together.
After a day taking macro shots, although admittedly not with a macro lens, I'm starting to look at a dedicated macro lens for the Olympus!
I wonder where this camera will take me next?