Recently my wife and I visited the Bloomland in OZ event that is being held at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario.

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Custom displays featuring various characters adapted from the Wizard of Oz motion picture were set up throughout the main building at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

It took a number of weeks for all of these displays to be set-up which resulted in most of the facility being shut down to visitors.

It took some patience to capture images that weren’t partially obscured by other visitors. This was especially true if one was attempting to capture a character in its entirety.

I made a rookie mistake before leaving home with my wife, and didn’t check the lens affixed to my camera.

I would have typically used my M.Zuiko PRO 12-100 mm f/4 zoom for this type of photographic opportunity, so I could take advantage of the broad focal length range of that lens.

Instead I arrived at the RBG with my M.Zuiko PRO 12-40 mm f/2.8 zoom. The more compressed focal length range did limit my on-site flexibility when capturing images of the Bloomland in OZ event.

There were many situations when I missed the additional focal length range. On the positive side, the M.Zuiko PRO 12-40 mm f/2.8 zoom is not a lens that I use that often for still photography.

It was one of my ‘go to’ lenses for my previous client video work. Being able to use it for some still photography was a beneficial practice exercise.

I quickly became accustomed to the focal length restrictions with this particular lens and focused my efforts on creating images without any other visitors in them.

Some of the figures were much easier to get ‘clean’ captures than others. For example, the suspended flying monkey in the above image was reasonably simple to capture as it was in the corner of a display area and the number of people shuffling past was somewhat reduced.

The image above was much more challenging as it was in the middle of a high traffic area. I had to wait several minutes for a break in the crowd. And, even then I only had a couple of seconds to compose and capture my photograph.

As regular readers know, my eye is naturally drawn to repeating patterns and textures.

So… I couldn’t help myself and captured a couple of images with repeating patterns.

There were a few displays that had a reasonable number of different types of blossoms. Overall the display areas were dominated by orchid blossoms… about 25,000 of them according to the Royal Botanical Gardens.

I found a few details to photograph, but not as many as I would have liked as I didn’t have enough focal length range in a number of situations.

Some of the more whimsical items, like the wasp in the above image, were a fair size. I captured this image from a distance of 3.4 metres (~11.2 feet).

I did a bit of experimentation with Handheld In-Camera Focus Stacking and had limited success doing so.

I’m not sure if it was my lack of technique with the PRO 12-40, or if I needed to adjust my standard settings with that lens.

I did find that my images had more artifacts in them than what I usually experience. Overall, it was great to get out with my camera again.

I’ve been spending the majority of my time over the past number of weeks finishing up my upcoming eBook on macro and close-up photography. We are in the final proofreading stage so the launch of this eBook is imminent.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. All images were created from out-of-camera jpegs or RAW files using my standard process in post. This is the 1,513 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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