Earlier this month my wife and I visited The National Home Show in Toronto.  This show also includes a flower and garden event called Canada Blooms. This article shares a number of images from Canada Blooms, including some macro flower photographs. These were captured hand-held in the floral arrangement display area.

I knew from visits to this event in previous years that the lighting in the Canada Blooms display area tends to be quite poor. I thought it would be interesting to take a Nikon 1 J5 with some extension tubes as well as an Olympus TG-5 to see what I could capture.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

In order to document some gardening ideas and concepts I often capture some images for my wife. I quickly discovered this was quicker to accomplish by using the TG-5. This was especially true in situations where I shot at f/2 in very low light.

The Olympus TG-5 is priced quite a bit higher than other cameras in its category. One of the reasons for that is that the zoom lens in the TG-5 starts at f/2, rather than f/3.5 which is common in competitive cameras. The TG-5 also can capture RAW files which I find very helpful. The sensor in the TG-5 uses BSI technology.

Being able to shoot at f/2 and still get a sufficient amount of depth-of-field allowed me to shoot at a decent ISO setting. This is important given the tiny sensor in the TG-5.

I was even able to get some reasonable results when shooting at 1/13th of a second, indicating that the image stabilization in the TG-5 performs decently well.

These images are not ‘mission critical’ in terms of the required quality for an outing such as this. Suffice to say I was pleased with the results achieved given the lightening conditions.

I couldn’t resist using the Microscopic mode on my Olympus TG-5 to capture some extreme close ups of some of the flowers used in the floral displays. All of the images I capture using the microscopic mode are done using the Olympus LG-1 LED Light Guide. This is a ‘must have’ accessory to do this kind of work.

In Microscopic mode the TG-5 will focus as close as only one centimetre away from the subject.

As I play around more and more with the Olympus TG-5, I’m starting to get used to how to work with this semi-automatic camera. I’d rather have more direct control with settings… but it is what it is.

My Nikon 1 gear ended up sitting in my camera bag for most of the show as the TG-5 provided quite snappy auto focusing performance in the low light. One never knows if an outing was successful until images are up on a computer screen. Based on these images from Canada Blooms, I’d give the outing a passing grade.

The only regret that I had during our visit to Canada Blooms was that I left my spare battery for the TG-5 at home. I was having quite a bit of fun and I would have shot more frames if I would have not run out of battery power.

Technical Note:
All photographs in this article were captured hand-held using camera gear as per the EXIF data. All images were produced from RAW files using DxO PhotoLab and CS6.

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