How to Shoot the 'Boring' Green Season and Actually Get Keepers

Midsummer is the season most landscape-focused shooters dread. From June through September, everything turns the same flat shade of green, and broad scenes start to feel repetitive and lifeless.

Coming to you from Simon Booth, this practical video makes the case that close-up work is exactly what mid-season shooting calls for, and that you don't need expensive macro gear to pull it off. Booth shoots the whole session using a 100mm lens with a close-up filter, no dedicated macro lens required. He visits two locations, starting at a canal-side spot after overnight rain, where he finds a creeping buttercup with a bead of water sitting on one of its petals. He sets his aperture to f/3.5 and keeps his sensor plane parallel to the flower face to maximize sharpness without stopping down, which would pull distracting background detail into focus. The water droplet does the heavy lifting compositionally, and Booth explains exactly why he centered the flower rather than pushing it to the left edge of the frame.

At his second location, a woodland filled edge-to-edge with ferns, he spots a backlit frond standing vertically against a green background and spends time working the shot under worsening conditions. Because the fern is moving in the wind, he pushes ISO to 800 to get his shutter speed up to 1/100 sec, and he manually tracks the central rib of the frond rather than relying on autofocus, firing when the alignment is right. The spore pods along the fronds read as dark marks against the backlit scene and add structure the shot wouldn't have otherwise. Midges eventually drive him away from the spot, but not before he has several strong frames.

The third shot involves a rowan tree. He deliberately pulls back from where the ideal crop would be, shooting at f/8 instead of something like f/16, then plans to crop in post. The reason is shutter speed: working closer would magnify the movement of the branch and force him to either use a slower shutter or push ISO into ranges he doesn't want. Pulling back keeps the shutter at a usable speed while still delivering the sharpness he's after across the overlapping leaflets. Octagonal out-of-focus highlights from the canopy above fill the background. He's careful throughout to use the sycamore overhead to block harsh sky from the frame, keeping the highlights from competing with the subject. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Booth.