Fun In The Treehouse
Friends have a vinyard and wanted to get some nice images for their website.
Payment as promised was in kind, a dozen bottles of their excellent (and quite expensive) Pinot Grigio, but I would have done it for free.
Another reason for this post is to share the process and to reinforce the power of M43 for shallow depth of field work. I have said before, the shallow depth of field control of M43 is enough for most tasks, sometimes still too shallow. The ability to use any aperture on the lens is a real bonus.
When using full frame, I would go to anything wider than f2 very sparingly and can remember many times when I double or tripple checked focus, often using live view on the rear screen with manual focus if able. With M43 mirrorless cameras I just place my focus point and shoot.
The bulk of these images were taken wide open on my f1.8 45, 75 or f2.8 12-40 and 40-150 lenses, or close to it.
The 75 wide open. Shooting basically straight into the sun, the background Bokeh is a little busy due to the relative distances of the lens to subject and subject to background. The slightly nervous uprights are grasses about ten feet behind the bottles.
This is better with nothing directly behind the subject. The lighter coloured blurred object to the left is the vinyards treehouse.
The above two images were taken the first day just to try out some ideas.
Shooting again into the sun, this time bouncing off the water, I tried using just reflections off the house front (mostly glass).
The image above is recoverrred as far as C1 can, but failed to hold enough information for my idea.
Wanting to try to preserve the background (Schouten Island), I switched to an off camera Godox 860 flash, lens stopped down to f6.7 (f13-16 ish on a full frame) for some hint of shape, using high speed sync. Even with M43, there is little chance of holding detail when things are this far separated at any aperture, but I hope I nailed the balance.
The above image shows how useful flash can be even when daylight is strong. My wife held the flash about two feet to the left firing through a hand held 42” Godox brolly.
Next we decided to incorporate the actual tree house into the images.
First attempt is interesting, using a soft foreground for a frame using the 150mm f2.8. The 40-150 Pro has some slightly nervous background Bokeh.
A little more coherent. 75mm f3.5.
An off-cut vine used foe some interest. This vine strand did a bit of work, but after about 30 minutes, it started to look a little tired. The 45mm wide open is a little warmer than the 75, which makes processing less straight forward.
12-40 at 28mm f2.8. I used this lens often at 28mm without looking at the zoom position. I could have used my 25 or 30mm lenses if I had them with even smoother blurring.
There were a lot more images of family etc, but I will let the client use these as desired.
Back to the house and flash was tried again, used more as gentle fill than to fight the sun, but we found that the brolly alone in reflecter configuration was enough. Lesson I learned here was to clean the glass! 28mm on the 12-40 f2.8.
Going for more context, 17mm at f6.7 on the 12-40. Flash through the brolly again.
Some final detail shots while the greenery was at all useful. 45mm f1.8, the natural warmth of the lens helping here.
Gear list;
1 EM1x (the new one)
1 45 and 75 f1.8’s
1 12-40 and 40-150 f2.8’s
1 Godox 860 flash and off camera controller
1 Godox 42” brolly and hand bracket
2 bottles, glass (clean) and a bit of greenery
1 vinyard complete with tree house