In yesterday’s post, what you saw was an example of using hyperfocal distance to my advantage. Go ahead and read the wikipedia article. I’ll wait.
Now, why do we care? If you can grasp this concept, then it’ll drastically improve the depth of your landscape images.
What does this mean to us when shooting? (more, after the jump) Click to continue »
HDR of Eklutna
For a few years, a clean sensor didn’t actually matter to me. Using wide-open f/stops, most grime is completely blurred out. Then came this year, and I started to use much smaller, finer f/stops. In just a few months, I’m far more experienced at cleaning a sensor. Have to – otherwise I’m spending huge amounts of time fixing photos in photoshop.
Take the photo to the right. By using a small f/stop, I was able to get everything in focus. But this includes even things on the sensor itself! After merging into a single image, I ended up with more than 30 individual edits to remove specs. And that was clean, compared to just a few weeks ago.
In this case, the dirt came from camping. Dirty, messy camping. Gets everywhere, and I sleep with the camera in my tent. Disturbing? Maybe. But I’m not so disturbed that I’m carrying a sensor cleaner with me everywhere!
Flowers in the sun: just an up-close pic of the lilacs growing in our front yard…
Pink flowers in the sun.
Wolverine running around his cage
No, not drinking places. Although that would be an interesting experience, too. Shooting through bars in cages is what I’ve referring to. The technique is similar to shooting through glass: you still want to get close to the bars, use a wide-open f/stop… But here’s the rub: it’s much more relative. The closer you are to the bars and the further the subject is from them, the more they’ll blur out.
Witness the wolverine to the right: you can’t tell that there’s a metal fence between us, but you can see the far end of the cage behind this fellow. In this case, I was already about 3 feet from the fence, but this guy was an easy 40 feet away (possibly further – I’m lousy at gauging distances). I didn’t have a top-of-the-line zoom lens with me, but the distance is such that it didn’t matter – Even at f/5.6, the bars are gone.
Gold on a sea of Green - a picture from a walk I took with my daughter
A wise man once told me that the single best think you can do for your subjects is to control the background. Ever since then, I’ve been working on controlling that background, to either offset or compliment the subject in a photo.
This is a complete lie. The man who said that was Moose Petersen, and he was telling an entire class at last year’s photo safari at photoshop world. And he said it approximately 15 minutes before I asked the question about snow that would haunt me for the next six months. But I’ve already gone there.
No, he was saying that, from his perspective, the number one thing he did to improve his pictures was to make sure the background fit the image. I’m barely understanding what he meant, but I’m starting to understand.
The photo to the right: there is a small bed of flowers up the road. They’re fairly young right now, not fully opened. Quite beautiful, but hard to photograph. From above, you get flat light and not a terribly interesting image. From the side, it’s a level sea of flowers. From each angle, things kinda start looking… weird.
What you see here was a deliberate placement of the blurred background around the main (sharp) flower: each flower is separate, but only one stands out. That one is taller than the rest.
A counter, example: the same flower, from a different angle:
Gold on Black, a different angle to the same flower
The top flower is the exact same one as before, only from a different angle. The background is in shadow, whereas the light is on the flowers. This is technically a strobist technique, but by dropping exposure by 1-2 stops, I was able to get the greens in the background down to nearly black. A slight tweak of curves in photoshop, and it’s almost flat black.
Again, it’s about controlling the background.
Horsetail fern in our backyard. Stupid things, can't get rid of them.
A couple of days ago I mentioned that I left my camera on auto-bracket. Merrily snapping away, I ended up with precisely… crap.
However, one photo just barely squeaked in as decent. About 5 minutes in photoshop and it came out as you see to the right.
Details on the photo:
Seems that 640 ISO is the best that I can do with my SLR. Any faster and grain really pops in there.