Recently I went for a trip to the Tamborine Mountain Botanical Gardens. It was after we had quite a lot of rain and the day was overcast and very nice for photography. The beautiful lake there had many water lilies in bloom and were great photo subjects.
The gardens are just a short drive through the hinterland and west from the Gold Coast where I live, the Tamborine Mountain Botanic Gardens combine a very colourful and great range of exotic and native flora. The Gardens include a beautiful small lake as the centre piece of the gardens, a very nice Japanese themed garden and a tropical rainforest walk amongst the trees.
The Gardens are supported, maintained and administered by many volunteers and while we were there, there were many workers, all volunteers who were hard at work keeping the garden neat and tidy.
The colours of the water lilies were very beautiful and almost looked luminous in the subdued lighting. What surprised me most that day was that there were many frogs around the water lilies, they were the small green tree frogs and were sitting in the water lily flowers and also on the stems of the flowers. I have never seen so many frogs in the one area.
I believe it must have been the cooler, moist weather that caused the frogs to be so plentiful. Also I have noted that around the lake there do not appear to be any eastern water dragons which would keep the frog numbers down if they were present.
The above image of the fern frond together with all the images in this Blog, have been captured with my Nikon D810 camera and Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E telephoto lens. I would normally have used my 200mm Micro lens for images such as these but the water lilies were too far away from the water edge and required the longer lens.
The two images below of the water fountain, have been captured at very different camera setting to illustrate how the settings can affect the image differently.
In the first image the camera settings were f/9, 1/80sec, ISO64. With this image there is detail in the water droplets due to the faster shutter speed of 1/80sec. An even faster shutter speed than this could have been used to give even more detail in the water droplets.
In the second image the camera settings were f/25, 1/4sec, ISO64. These setting resulted in all the water of the fountain being blurred. A camera setting of 1/4sec is very slow when used with a long telephoto lens such as the 200-500mm lens used here. As you can see here a small difference in the shutter speed can give a huge difference to the appearance of the image.
Although the 200-500mm lens has inbuilt vibration reduction (VR), I will always use a solid monopod to steady the lens and to avoid any vibration or movement of the camera/lens combination.