A big hole and a travel camera

 I went out into the garden yesterday to grab a photo of some garden work I've been doing in the past few days. I took my travel camera as this is what I use for odd photos that I imagine most people capture with their smartphones (as probably I would if I had one).  This is what the area I was working on looked like a couple of years ago. 

The tree stump is the remains of a big cherry tree that, much to our disappointment, we had to have taken down because it was rotting and had the potential to do a lot of damage if it fell over. Along with the loss soon after, to our great surprise, of a big apple tree (which we never suspected had a problem, but which turned out to be rotten too), that was the end of our little woodland garden area. (By a stroke of good fortune it fell in to our garden and just crushed our old garden shed which needed replacing anyway, rather than falling where the prevailing westerly winds would have sent it, crashing down on our neighbours' cars, and possibly of course also our neighbours. It doesn't bear thinking about.)

Anyway, the stump of the cherry tree developed a nasty bracket fungus that was spreading in a way my wife didn't like at all (She is the Gardener. I am the Gardener's Assistant.) Her decision was that it would have to go. We will get a man with a stump grinder to get rid of it, but we want to limit the damage so we have cleared the plants out of the area the Gardener is prepared to sacrifice. My job was then to expose the roots and remove the earth so we could see what was going on. This would allow some of the roots to be cut out, with less collateral damage than with grinding, which can leave a difficult to repair mixture of subsoil and top soil depending on how far the grinding goes down and how far the subsoil comes up. It's lucky I did remove a lot of earth because it turns out that around the tree the subsoil came very close to the surface. As I removed it I kept the worst of the subsoil separate from the better soil and so I'll be able to refill it putting the subsoil back at the bottom.

So, here is what that area looks like now. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised the roots were substantial. It was a large tree. 

Here is the earth I removed. 120 or so bags, partly filled; no point doing my back in. A couple of tons? More perhaps.

Job finished. All wrapped up to keep it from getting wet and claggy.

And that might have been that for the day in the garden. But as I walked away I noticed the light on a couple of wallflowers. I had a camera in hand, so I photographed them. 

Then I noticed more light. And ... well, I carried on photographing. Perhaps I should have gone back indoors and got a more suitable camera. I generally use a Panasonic G9 micro four thirds camera with an Olympus 60mm macro lens for flowers and other botanical subjects. This gives me two excellent tools for working with flowers etc: 

• "Post focus" 6K video which makes it very quick and simple to capture videos, hand-held, that are easy to use for focus stacking
• Aperture bracketing, which lets me capture a sequence of seven images from f/2.8 to f/22 from which I can, later on my PC, select which I like best in terms of the balance between focus coverage of the subject and the look of the background; one (to my eye) improves as the other (to my eye) gets worse as the aperture changes.

The G9 has some other nice features too like: 

• A fully articulated screen which lets me capture at odd angles I couldn't achieve using the viewfinder, and makes it easy to work in portrait mode, which I do a lot with flowers, using the LCD screen (I almost never use a viewfinder). 
• A very flat Cinelike D profile that helps expand the available dynamic range which makes up a bit for the fact that video delivers JPEGs rather than giving the flexibility of raw that I get with stills.
• A joystick to move the focus area

In contrast, my (fit into a pocket) travel camera is a Panasonic TZ90 with a very small, 1/2.3" sensor that has 20 megapixels stuffed on to it, and a little lens that delivers a huge range of focal length from 24mm to 720mm full frame equivalent, which obviously is not going to be of the best optical quality. It doesn't have an articulated screen, so working at odd angles, and working in portrait mode are at best difficult, and because of the way the screen is hinged I can't use a lens hood like I can with the G9, and this makes it much more difficult to see what is on the screen on a sunny day, which it was in this case. 

The TZ90 doesn't have a joystick or Cinelike D. It doesn't have aperture bracketing. It does have post focus but it is 4K rather than 6K and so only uses 8 million of its 20 million small pixels. And in any case the choice of apertures is very limited at the longish focal lengths I was using meaning that I was mainly using f/5.6 through just one stop to f/8. These are equivalent to f/ 32 and f/45 on full frame so you have very little control over the depth of field, which is always rather large. And for focus stacking these small apertures are not as good as larger apertures, which will give better detail and softer backgrounds.

And you can't photograph the small scene sizes that you can with a macro lens like I use on the G9.

All in all, the TZ90 is, to say the least, not ideal for photographing flowers etc.

But I find it interesting, instructive and fun to use different setups from time to time, even though (and perhaps because) they can be slow, difficult, awkward etc to use and limited in what they can achieve even in the best of circumstances.

And sometimes a bit of ingenuity can extend their capabilities. There were subjects that looked promising that were too small for the TZ90. So I went back indoors for a kit change, but rather than taking out a G9 I put a Canon 500D mild close-up lens on the TZ90 using a simple adaptor which I cobbled together as an experiment three years ago. The last three photos below used this arrangement.

Below there are some more photos from that session. They were all shot raw and processed with, in this order, DXO PhotoLab, Lightroom and Topaz DeNoise AI. Three of them had a round trip from Lightroom to Photoshop and back for some stretching and squashing of edges of the images to produce a better balanced composition.