Inside at the Botanic Gardens

Over the weekend I needed some shutter-time.  Saturday was gorgeous and near 70F, so I decided to spend a couple of hours at our nearly botanic garden, Tower Hill Botanic Gardens.  I put several lenses in my pack, but decided when I arrived to use an old 90mm Tamron macro lens, with an adapter for my Olympus E-M1. On an Olympus, this gives the lens an effective reach of 180mm, which is very handy, especially outside where you must stay on the garden walkways.

I was having so much fun (challenge?) manually focusing with this mechanically focusing manual lens, that I never switched to any of my other choices.  Even the superb Olympus 60mm macro stayed in my bag.

All of these shots were taken at full open aperture of F2.8.  The result is a very narrow depth of field... some people like that effect, others prefer the larger depth of field obtained by shooting at a narrower aperture.

The camera was hand-held. Focusing was manual, using the magnification and focus peaking features on the E-M1.  I have to say, getting accurate focus was difficult.  I shot at high enough shutter speed to eliminate camera shake; however, with a narrow depth of field many of the images were not focused where I intended.  I discarded a lot.

[Note:  My gut feeling is I get a higher keeper rate, with regard to focus, when using the Olympus 60mm macro mFT lens with autofocus and the small focus points.]