From my last visit to Harrismith in 20212. It all looks a bit apocolyptic.
Harrismith is a very small town (population 52)260km east of Perth in the Wheatbelt. Now we went there some thirteen years ago looking for orchids and we didn’t find any as it was too late. I did get the photo of the animal skull on pig face on a dried lake. So this year I’ve been looking for the Western Wispy Spider Orchid (Caladenia microchila) and the Yellow Granite Donkey Orchid and that search took me Harrismith as my last chance.
When I got there it was very apparent I wasn’t going to find much – the bush was very, very dry. Walking through it sounded like walking over Cornflakes – it was so crisp. What I did find was really on it’s last legs. There had been a substantial wildflower display, but it was basically all over. I’d have been better off going at least two weeks earlier. Still it was an enjoyable walk, there was plenty of bird activity and I left feeling I’d of got better photos if I’d taken my bird kit.
Sugar Orchid, Ericksonella saccharata. Harrismith, Western Australia.
There’s always a Green Spider Orchid (Caladenia falcata).
Purple Enamel Orchid, Elythranthera brunonis.
Yellow Granite Donkey Orchid, Diuris hazeliae.
The Western Wispy continues to evade me. I’ll have to wait to early next spring to resume the search.
Whenever I’ve stopped in Williams it always been on the way to somewhere else and I’ve always been quick to get a move on. Well the other day I gave Williams my full attention. There are a few good spots for orchids there and I wanted to visit one in particular as it is the home to the Common Dragon Orchid. Despite its name I’ve never found the Common Dragon Orchid to be very common – in fact I’d only seen a rather manky looking one some twenty years ago. That, as they say, is a long time between drinks.
The bit of scrubby land that is home to the flowers is pretty ordinary to look at. It’s situated on the corner of a busy highway and a dirt track. Judging from the car bodies, rusted metal, bottles and corrugated asbestos it’s been used for fly tipping for years. But situated under the sheaoak trees in amongst the needles were an amazing variety of orchids. Common Dragon Orchids, well they were certainly common there. There were hundreds of them.
The first three images are pretty straight photos using the Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro lens and STF-8 flash or the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 with no flash.
Common Dragon Orchid, Caladenia barbarossa. Williams, Western Australia.
Zebra Orchid, Caladenia cairnsiana. Williams, Western Australia.
Clubbed Spider Orchid, Caladenia longiclavata. Williams, Western Australia.
The last couple were done as focus stacks using the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 and MC-14 1.4x teleconverter. The stacks were assembled in Photoshop.
Common Dragon Orchid, Caladenia barbarossa. Williams, Western Australia.
Zebra Orchid, Caladenia cairnsiana. Williams, Western Australia.
It’s that time of year – the natural world here in Western Australia has started to step up a gear andit is time to get out and see it and more importantly photograph it.
I was recently reading a book on Western Australian orchids and I discovered within it mention of a few species that are found in the Wheatbelt, where I live, that I had never heard of before let alone seen. After a bit more research and a consultation with Florabase and Atlas of Living Australia I was all set to head off to Kweda.
Not a very reassuring sign.
Another comforting sign.
The floodway that empties into Lake Mears. Although there was a lot of the water it hadn’t flooded the road.
It was nice to get out and about again, but after seeing a couple of road signs I wasn’t so sure I’d made the right decision. Kweda Reserve is located on the corner of an intersection of two dirt roads and apart from the reserve the only other feature of note was a mobile phone tower. Getting out of the car it seemed as if the bottom end of the reserve once played host to a railway siding. The tracks were long gone only the embankments and a few bridges over creek lines remained. There was quite a bit of water about thanks to the late heavy rains and I was quite surprised as the genus of orchids I was looking for tend to favour drier sandy soils rather than the heavy wet clay that was at Kweda. There were a lot of birds and dragonflies about and I saw a bob tailed lizard happily grazing on some mushrooms.
The bottom end of Kweda Reserve used to have a railway line. The last vestiges of the embankment and bridges can still be seen.
Lots of late heavy rainfall have meant there is a surprising amount of water about.
One of the locals. Bob tailed lizard (Tiliqua rugosa). Kweda Reserve.
Western Wheatbelt Donkey Orchid, Diuris brachyscapa. Kweda.
Western Wheatbelt Donkey Orchid, Diuris brachyscapa. Kweda.
Fringed Mantis Orchid, aka Green Spider Orchid, Caladenia falcata. Kweda.
Did I find what I was looking for? No. But, I did find a couple of species I’d not photographed before so it was worth the effort. I’m also hoping to visit again, and the nearby Lake Mears, looking for wildlife.
The title for this blog entry came from the song by Misty In Roots.
This shot of a Scented Sun Orchid was what I considered my first successful photo of an orchid. The subject is separated from the background making easy to see.
I took what I call my first proper shot of an orchid back in 2008. Back then my technique was very simple – handheld with a macro lens. The problem was that it was often very difficult to isolate the flower from the background while having sufficient depth of field and a low ISO. For every successful photo there were hundreds of duds.
This shot of a Butterfly Orchid is one of the hundreds of duds. The messy background threatens to overwhelm the subject.
After about a year of trial and error (mostly error) I decided to photograph the orchids in the same way I would take a portrait of a person. Get down at “eye” level, use an off axis flash to provide the key light and have the natural light as my fill light at -1 to -2 stops. This was a huge improvement, but I still wasn’t getting the clarity and sharpness in the images I desired.
My first flash rig for photographing orchids. Using a flash brake allowed me to get the flash off of the lens axis and get a more pleasing lighting effect.
The next attempt at better lighting was a heavy tripod and light stand. My back hurts just looking at this photo.
The next evolution was to mount the camera on a tripod and then mount the flash to one of the tripod legs via a “magic arm”. This allowed greater choice in the positioning of the flash and allowed me to use different flash modifiers such as soft boxes, grids and snoots. The arrival of affordable and reliable wireless flash triggersmeant I could use multiple speedlights for more sophisticated lighting. This came a tremendous cost. I have a chronically bad back and all that kit was heavy, the tripod and “magic arm weighed just under 6Kg. Then there was the futzing about setting everything up, taking the shot, breaking it all down, walking to the next subject and then repeating it all again. Suddenly it wasn’t fun anymore. Something had to give and it was my back.
The diminutive Olympus EP-2. Just what the orthopaedic surgeon ordered.
A size comparison of my DSLRs (Canon 5d and 550d) and the Olympus EP-2 which replaced them.
In 2013 I bought an Olympus EP-2 mainly for travel and street photography. It was a revelation – small size, In Body Image Stabilisation (IBIS), and excellent flash implementation. It quickly became my orchid camera of choice. I could chuck out the tripod and become more mobile. It wasn’t all beer and skittles though. The 12Mp sensor wasn’t the best in terms of high ISO performance and dynamic range, the lack of a viewfinder made usage in bright sunlight problematic (solved with the addition of the optional EVF) and the contrast based autofocus system was a bit on the temperamental side. But the positives were enough to keep me using it and when the EM10 came out with a built in EVF, a better IBIS system and an improved sensor then I knew that the system would be just about perfect for what I did. I could walk around in the bush for hours at a time without back pain which meant I could explore further afield. This freedom allowed me to experiment a lot more.
Sigma’s 105mm f2.8 DG DN macro lens attached a Sony A7Rii.
The Tamron 35mm f2.8 lens has excellent macro capabilities.
Curly Locks, Thelymitra spiralis. Wandoo National Park, Western Australia. Sony A7r2 with Sigma 105mm f2.8 DG DN macro lens.
White Spider Orchid, Caladenia longicauda subsp longicauda. Wambyn, Western Australia. Sony A7r with Tamron 35mm f2.8 lens.
In 2021 I felt that I wanted more resolution than the 20Mp EM1 mk ii was giving me. So I tentatively dipped my toe into the world of full frame mirrorless and I went with a second hand Sony A7r2. The image files produced by the camera were absolutely gorgeous. Alongside my usual working method of using flash with macro lens I decided to experiment with environmental portraiture of orchids. For this I used a 35mm lens with a half size macro capability and the results were pleasing. The downsides were as follows. The rear LCD is hopeless in bright light and it has no touch control facility. The IBIS wasn’t as effective as that on my Olympus cameras and the sensor resolution emphasised very tiny camera shake. A tripod was the solution. The sensor is a dust magnet which means that changing lenses enables dust bunnies to proliferate. The answer was to have one camera with the 105mm macro and one camera with the 35mm. Arrrrrgh! I was back carrying a load of heavy equipment. So it was back to the Olympus kit.
This shot of a Lemon Scented Sun Orchid was made with the Olympus Em1 mk ii, Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 lens with 1.4 x teleconverter and the Olympus FL600R flash using the focus stacking function.
I’m still trying to evolve a style which produces a nice clean portrait of an orchid. One of the great benefits of Olympus’s cameras and lenses is that it allows very long telephoto lenses to have an almost macro capability. The use of such long lenses allows you to throw backgrounds well out of focus by dint of their increased magnification which reduces depth of field. The problem is that that decreased DOF means that it is hard to get your subject rendered sharp whilst retaining all that loverly bokeh. The counter to this is focus stacking which involves taking a series of pictures of the subject while moving the focus point and then blending the images in post. Olympus has a very neat feature that allows you to do this automatically in camera which is fantastic. Unfortunately the function limits your flash usage by restricting your maximum flash sync speed to 1/50th second and you have to manually set the flash exposure. I tried doing this for a while and it was a right royal pain. So now I don’t use the flash and just make the exposure using ambient light. The lens I’m using is the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 with the the mc-14 1.4 x teleconverter. This gives me a 210mm f4 lens (420mm in full frame terms). Despite shooting wide open this invariably means shooting at a low shutter speed. So while the IBIS is fantastic on my EM1 mk ii using it with a long lens while focus bracketing wasn’t the best way to proceed. So it was back to a tripod. My aluminium Manfrotto 055 tripod is a good tripod but it is that heavy you could use it as a boat anchor. It was time to get a bit of fibre in my life – carbon fibre. So I bought a nice SiruiAM-254 carbon fibre tripod which weighs just a smidge over 1Kg. It doesn’t have a centre column and so a minimum working height of 7.8cm which means you can get down and close to the subject. The results have been excellent and now I feel that using both my normal macro lens and the telephoto zoom with converter I’m getting closer to what I have envisioned.
The Sirui AM 254 tripod in action.
So this has been my journey of finding what works for me. I’ve discovered that learning how your equipment works is just as an important step in developing vision and style as is technique. Continual learning and experimentation will help you develop as an artist and we shouldn’t be afraid to do so. A few times I’ve felt that I was going backwards, but it was worth persevering. I’ve still got a couple of things to sort out, but I feel now I’m on the right track.
The following shots were made this last week.
Common Bunny Orchid, Eriochilus dilatatus subsp. multifloris. Oswald Sargent Reserve, Western Australia.A focus stack using the Olympus EM1 mk ii with the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 lens and 1.4 x teleconverter.
Hare Orchid or Fringed Hare Orchid (Leporella fimbriata). Oswald Sargent Reserve, Western Australia.
A male Blue Skimmer (Orthetrum caledonicum) at rest. Lake Leschenaultia, Western Australia.
We went to Lake Leschenaultia and I had all these plans to photograph dragonflies in flight. I’d got this shot all planed out in my mind to get a shot of one flying just over some reeds. I’d set the camera up with what would be the best lens and headed out to an area on the lakeside where I knew I’d find some and there would be some nice light. Except it was very windy and I couldn’t find any dragonflies. I went off to the reed beds behind the boat shed thinking that should prove more fruitful as it was in the lee of the wind. There were loads there flying around and it was amazing to watch them chase each other around, but from a photographic point of view it wasn’t so good as there was a rather belligerent tiger snake who really did not want to share his basking spot. So I walked around the lakeside a bit further and found another spot that was sheltered from the wind. But try as I might I just could not get the shot I was after. They wouldn’t fly where I wanted, wouldn’t fly slow enough or in a straight line. In the end I had to content myself with the photo above. The dragonfly just rested on that twig for a couple of seconds in the shade and then it was off.
Nature photography is hard. We can have an idea of the shot in our minds eye and try to make it happen, but then nature doesn’t play ball with us and then we have to adapt and take what we’re given. Bit like life really.
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