RHS Wisley in September
I am lucky enough to live a short drive away from RHS Wisley. I visit regularly with my family and always take my camera. I know absolutely nothing about horticulture and am not the best at remembering names of flowers, but I certainly like to look at them and take photos of them, and Wisley is an excellent place to do that. It changes through each season so I was interested to visit in September and see what caught my eye.
What I packed
I mix and match what I take when I go to Wisley, but this time I knew I probably wanted to isolate flowers, so I took:
Nikon Z8
For photographing small things that you might not be able to get close to, this camera allows you to crop your images heavily in post-processing because of the 45MP sensor
Nikkor Z 24-120mm f4
I use this for flowers a lot because whilst it is not a macro lens, it still allows you to get close to your subject when it is extended to 120mm. It focusses fast, and it’s sharp through the whole aperture and focal range.
This visit was right in the middle of the RHS Wisley flower show, and so there were quite a lot of exhibitors, each with their own themes for their displays. One such exhibitor was displaying only alliums, and in a selection of colours. I stood next to the display for a while because these alliums were attracting the odd bee and as it was a bright cloudless day, I did not want any blue sky. I thought that filling the frame of the photo with the purple allium and then a single bee with the texture of the alliums behind it might give a nice result. Especially if there was the golden colour of the bee on a vibrant purple allium. I managed to take a few photos I liked, though none quite delivered what I was after. The photo below comes close although I would have preferred to have been able to see one of the bee’s eyes.
This next photo is a prime example of one that I knew nothing about, but I loved the shape and flow. The latin name is Catananche caerulea however it is known as Cupid’s Dart (I think - as I said, I’m not amazing at this kind of thing). This is just the bud, however it has everything I love about nature. It is intricate, delicate, uniform, yet it has a resilience and beauty even just as a bud. I like isolating this type of flower, and giving a hint of more in the background.
Whenever I go to Wisley, I always come away with photos that are just a full frame of texture. I’m not sure what this plant is, but I just really like to try and capture a frame of the repeating patterns and shapes, with some in focus, some out of focus.
This next one was something that I tried and I quite liked the result. I often try to isolate a particular flower that I like by zooming in on it which subsequently compresses the image and if there are any other flowers in the foreground or background, they become blobs of colour. A lot of the time I like those results. However, I wanted to try something different for this big pink Cosmos. It was part of a bigger bed of flowers and I liked the context of all the flowers around it. So I went the other way, and rather than zooming all the way in, I zoomed out and took a very wide (well, wide for me) shot of this one. The other flowers are slightly out of focus but I like their supporting role in the photo.
I love a bee on a flower. When you are somewhere where the bees are flying around trying to get what they need, it can seem chaotic. With a bit of patience though you can get a photo of a bee that looks calm and beautiful. I will never tire of these sort of photos. This, for me, is what I love about photographing nature. It is regularly brutal and unforgiving, but there are these moments of beauty that will never happen again in exactly the same way.
I had no real plan for this trip, not least because it was primarily an opportunity to see family and bring my camera along for the ride. Although these images do lean towards the kind of photos I like to take, I still came away with something new as well as some other photos that are similar to what I’ve taken before. However, you just do not know what you are going to find when you go out into nature, so you have to be open-minded and see what catches your eye. I should point out that sometimes I come away with nothing, because nothing catches my eye, and that is ok. This time though, it was a good session.
