going in without protection

I've been spending a lot of time in my garden lately.  Well, we've worked really hard on it and it's now bearing photographic fruit so to speak.

I released a video a couple of weeks back all about the things I can see there, and one of the images was a rather abstract one of some ferns.  Now, to get this picture I had to essentially just shove my camera blindly into a dense crop of ferns and hope for the best.

Now, you might think this rather foolish.  I mean, I could damage the front element of my lens, couldn’t I?  Well, yes, and although I don’t use a plain protection filter on any of my lenses, the Laowa I use has one built in, with the actual elements living behind it.   I could of course scratch that, but it’s just a plain bit of glass which could be polished or replaced if necessary.  So, I don’t mind is the upshot!

Onto the picture, and essentially, I'm looking for that goldilocks abstract image - not so obvious that you can tell what it is straight away, but also not so obscure that you've zero idea!  Here's the one I landed on:

Fujifilm X-H2, Laowa 65mm f2.8 ultra-macro
1/15th of a second at f2.8, ISO 125
handheld
lots of prodding!

Just in case you haven't seen that video, here it is:

And here is my latest video, looking at how I shoot and process my dreamy, ethereal (OK, soft!!) flower images: