Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens

Now, if you’ve read this site before, you’ll be very aware that I am a terrible identifier of species. And as bad as I am identifying animals, I am even more hopeless at identifying plants. Whilst I am aware that in this day and age I could ask an AI and have it give me an answer that will at least be confident, if not correct, I’d really rather not then just be a parroter of those confident but potentially inaccurate answers. So buckle up, because we’re about to see a whole bunch of images where I don’t really know what we’re looking at. Which I’m sure is just the sort of hook to really keep you reading. Fortunately I’ve never had much truck with such nonsense on this website.

Anyway, we start with a blue flower.

Although I was using my old 100mm f/2.8 macro, I had the sense in this shot to close up the aperture a bit to ensure I got everything I wanted in focus.

Sometimes, though, a bigger aperture was warranted.

I don’t end up using thes macro lens that often. Which is a bit of a shame because as you can see, it gives lovely results.

Up the hill from the gardens stands an old chapel. From most locations in the garden it isn’t visible, but there are a few spots where you can get a glimpse. When we found one, it was an excuse to switch to my 300mm telephoto (the longest I had at the time) to get a shot of it framed by the trees.

However it was quickly back to the macro lens to photograph flowers. A challenge I faced was the light. I some places it was quite harsh, being as it was late June. Sometimes the shadows worked nicely to bring the flowers out from the background.

My goal was trying to capture some of the colours and textures of the petals. Sometimes that was easier than others.

That can be a bit of a challenge when shooting at f/2.8 this close, especially if there’s any sort of breeze.

In one part of the gardens there was a rope bridge across a pond. At the time we were visiting it also happened to be catching the sun nicely. This finally necessitated the use of my normal zoom lens.

It was not long, however, before I was back on my macro lens looking at flowers.

Soon, finally, I caught a bug on one of the plants, and was able to creep close enough to photograph it without it flying away.

Presently, there was another one – admittedly not quite as big as the first one.

Luckily the light generally worked for me, I wasn’t fighting harsh light all that often.

Once again, feel free to let me know in the comments if you know the names of any of these plants. I know that plants, more than animals, can have effective but quite peculiar names.

Whilst crouching down photographing flowers, I took a shot along the path. It looked quite nice at f/2.8.

At times I took the idea of macro to more of an extreme, like this closeup of a leaf.

Perhaps I should have closed up the aperture more to get more of the leaf in focus, but I don’t dislike the result of shooting wide open.

These next flowers are a similar shape as many of the ones we’ve seen before, but a different colour. That might mean they’re a different plant.

These, agin, look very similar, but with a hint of blue (have you noticed I’m running out of things to say?).

We soon found another pond area, where I could photograph some lily pads.

Here there were also some lovely blue dragonflies flying about. This was about as close as I could get.

My final shot of this little trip was – well, it was just another flower, wasn’t it?

I’m pretty pleased with this assortment of images, mainly because this is the first set of this nature that I’ve managed to capture to this level. Usually I fail to achieve this degree of sharpness, especially when shooting macro.

Shame I essentially have no idea what I’ve photographed in this post.

As always, there are a few extra shots in the gallery below.