Garlic Hill | Weekly Photo #107
With regards to my photography, it’s been a productive couple of weeks. I’ve managed a few trips into London and although it turned out to be rather cloudy (typical!), it still felt great to be up there and I even managed to get the filters out to take some long exposure images around More London and St Katherine Docks. A bit more local to me, I made a few early morning trips into the forest and on my last visit, I was greeted with some pretty special foggy conditions which along with the vivid greens and late spring colours, transformed the look of the woodland and I spent a fantastic few hours taking advantage of the conditions and seeking out various compositions.
Oh, and I broke my 55-200mm telephoto lens, so I’ve had to organise a repair on that too!
Fujifilm XT2 | XF10-24mm | 14mm | 1/30th Second | f/8 | ISO400
I found this woodland, just a few minutes from my home earlier this year. It sits on top of the hill along the north downs in Surrey and offers a variety of different trees and woodland scenes to photograph and as a bonus, it’s situated over 200ft up which means when the clouds are low, it often gets foggy up there which is great for woodland photography. Unfortunately, on this particular day, as I headed out to photograph the wild garlic there was no fog to be seen. You win some, you lose some!
While exploring the woodland a few weeks before, I spotted a small area, no more than 10m by 10m along a steep bank that was covered in recently sprouted wild garlic leaves so I made a mental note to return when the garlic was due to flower and got on my merry way. Fast forward three or four weeks and I’m on my hands and knees, climbing the same steep bank as I attempted to photograph these strong-smelling wildflowers. Leading up to this day, there had been a lot of rain and not only was the bank extremely steep, it was also incredibly slippery. If that wasn’t bad enough, I also had to be extremely careful not to flatten the garlic as I climbed but with hands and knees covered in mud, I eventually made it up and found my spot.
I wanted to get close and wide for this photo as it wasn’t a particularly big area of garlic and I wanted to emphasise the flowers in the foreground, making them appear more prominent in the frame but this presented a problem with depth of field. Being so close to the foreground, there was no way I was going to have the depth of field I needed for acceptable sharpness from front to back, so I decided to focus stack the shot. So, after manually dialling in my exposure, I went about taking three or four photos, focusing on key areas of the scene to make sure, when I got back to the computer to blend them together, the wild garlic would be sharp across the entire scene.
This was my first attempt at scouting and photographing wild garlic and overall, I’m quite happy with the final photo. I would have preferred a slightly cleaner composition, particularly on the right-hand side where the trees overlap and a little mist in the air would have been a nice touch too. The good thing so close to this woodland is that I visit as often as I like to seek out new compositions in different conditions.
Until next week.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.