One of the problems with going to Bloom in the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon that we just had was that many others had the same idea and so it was very busy. This made getting photographs of the show gardens a little bit more difficult – or at least photographs which didn’t feature other visitors to the show. It turned out though that there was a bigger difficulty with photographing some of the show gardens – their size.
On Thursday someone had asked on Twitter what lens should they bring to Bloom if they could only bring one. From the responses I saw both 50mm and 24-70mm lenses were being suggested.
My first thought was that the 50mm lens would be a good one too – it’s small and light for a start, and the focal length is such that you can get decent pseudo-macro shots with it (mine focuses pretty close too) for detail flower shots, while also using it as a portrait lens if you were there to photograph people. Its downfall in my mind (and why I didn’t bring mine, seeing as I did only want to bring one lens myself) was that it wasn’t very wide for any landscape-type shots, even on a full frame camera, but especially on a crop-sensor camera (where it effectively becomes a 75mm lens).
What I ended up bringing was the 24-70mm – yes it’s bigger and heavier, but it encompasses that 50mm focal length for the flower/portrait shots – in fact, 70mm might even be better – and still has the wider 24mm field of view. I thought this would be sufficiently wide to photograph the show gardens, but it turned out that this was true for only a handful of them.
The people problem didn’t help, in that moving further back for a wider view wasn’t an option as the space between me and the garden quickly filled with more people. So I settled for composing tighter on the larger gardens, focusing on specific details (a bit like yesterday’s photo), and when a smaller garden came along that I could frame in 24mm, I did what I could with that too.
The garden pictured above, which instantly reminded me of Tellytubbies, just about squeezed into the frame, although I had to maintain an elevated perspective on the garden to manage that, and really a 12-24mm lens would have made for a much better photo.
Even this alternative view of the same garden, although not as much about the structure as the previous photo, might be better – it was taken from camera left in the top photo, with a much lower camera angle, and like above, you can see that I was favouring the wide aperture/narrow depth of field look that I mentioned yesterday.
It’s worth pointing out that didn’t stay stuck at the 24mm end of the lens for the entire day – in fact the first shot I took, after walking into the first marquee to be greeted by this magnificent eagle, was at 70mm – again the problem here was that he was surrounded by lots of people, but I could isolate him with a tighter composition.
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