I’ve just published a new photo essay over on my Photo Stories blog. I had visited a nearby urban farm back in May and taken lots of photos, and I was captivated by the colour and texture that images of nature. You should check out the blog post here before you carry on. As I try to keep my Photo Stories blog relatively gear and “technical nerdy stuff” free, I wanted to talk about the technicalities of the images here.

I didn’t set out to photograph these with any particular plan. In fact, we just went to go for a nice walk, and I happened to bring a camera with me. I’m glad I did because the light was perfect and I got some images that I really like.

The camera I brought with me was my trusty old Sony A6000 equipped with the sigma 30mm lens. Not exactly a standout combination you might think, but it actually works really well for these kinds of images. The reason is two fold. The Sigma lens, which is the f/2.8 version, despite being super cheap, is actually a really good lens. It has lovely bokeh in my opinion, and more importantly it has a relatively short focus distance. I was able to get really close to the plants without having to use a macro lens, and this worked to give good separation and good blurry backgrounds in certain cases. It also renders details really sharp.

The other thing I like about this combination is that it focuses effortlessly on these kinds of images. I had tried shooting in the same spot with the Fuji X-E4, and it has real difficulty in focussing on plant details in certain cases. Especially if there is something close in either the foreground or the background - it just picks that instead, even when it’s not near the focus point. It doesn’t matter if you change the size of the focus point to make it smaller, it’s much less reliable in these kinds of situations. The Sony / Sigma combo nails it every time with no fuss.

Another thing I really like about this combination is the Sony colours really work on these kinds of greens against the bright colours of the flowers. It may have issues with flesh tones, but on these kinds of scenes, the Sony colour really work.

I processed these in Lightroom, and to be honest, I didn’t need to do much. I just tweaked the contrast a bit in most cases, and maybe added a vignette to help focus the attention. The one thing you need to be careful of is the use of clarity. Too much clarity can kill the lovely bokeh, so you really need to be careful with it, even using it selectively with a mask as opposed to overall. As an aside, one of the things that would be nice to see Adobe add to Lightroom is a smart mask that only selects areas in focus. In some cases though you can use “select Subject” to mask the area you want to use clarity on and it will work reasonably well.

lightroom screenshot showing mask selection

The other thing about this process is choosing which images to actually use. I shot way more than made it to the photo essay, and even on my first attempt to cull it down, I only got it to 100 images. After doing some more trimming, and eliminating duplicate or similar shots, and generally being ruthless about it, I managed to get it down to 34, but when I go back and look again, there are still images that I think that maybe I should have used. But you have to have a cut off point when doing these kinds of things.

Anyway, don’t forget to check out the full photo essay, and see the full range of images from this shoot.

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