Orange Log

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Stephen Parker

Hi All,

The other weekend I went hiking and came across a section of track where a number of rather large trees had fallen across it. They were cut away so hikers could once again walk along the track. In this photo I tried to capture in a documentary way, the size of these trees that were cut away.

Equipment: Canon 5D mark II with a Canon EF24mm f/4.0 lens at 45mm EFL.
Exposure: 1/320s, f/8.0 & ISO 400.
Processing: LR3 camera landscape raw conversion with a little extra saturation and contrast. Cropped to 4×5 format.

Since I wanted to emphasis the size of these logs, I tried to get quite close to one of them and put it in the corner so you could still see the path that they blocked. However I don’t think it worked out that well. I think it is a little too far into the corner. Perhaps it needs some space around it. Also the trail appears quite faint. I would like to make it a little more dominant. Any ideas?

Thanks for looking.

steve

Niagra Falls

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Geoff

Canon EOS 550D
1/1000 sec at f/6.3, ISO 100
18mm (Canon EF-S18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens)

I took this last weekend, on a trip to Niagra Falls. Boring grey day, not really well suited to photographing the falls. In fact, I’ve probably got better shots of it with a P&S from a few years ago.

But this is probably the best of those that I took, and interestingly it’s the fastest shot too. The speed has cut through the mist that swirls around down the bottom of the falls and usually turns them into a white blob. Next time, I’ll try pushing it up to 1/4000 and see what I get with that.

Anyway, what else can I do on a grey boring day, to make a picture look more interesting?

Old Saw Mill

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Stephen Parker

Hi all,

The other day while out hiking, I visited the site of an old saw mill. There’s not much left just a sign indicating the site and an old blade that’s been warped by the heat of bush fires. For the time being it’s quite overgrown.

In this image I was trying to go for something of a documentary style. I wanted to include the sign, saw blade and other rusted metal parts. I thought the teeth of the saw were most interesting so I tried to emphasis them by getting close so the would dominate the frame. I started with on camera flash to add some light deep in the forest but that gave an ugly shadow to the saw teeth. So I used a sync cable and positioned the flash a little off camera and to the right so it shone a little behind the blade to remove the shadow. However I find the saw teeth still don’t have the impact I would like. The teeth don’t contrast much at all with the background. Any ideas how I could go about getting them to separate more from the background or stand out more in this image?

Equipment: Canon EOS 5D2 with a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0 lens at 28mm EFL.
Exposure: 1/6s, f/8.0 & ISO 100. Tripod, MLU, remote release and wired off camera flash.
Processing: LR3 camera Landscape raw conversion.

Thanks for looking…
steve

Photographer

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Stephen Parker

Hi all,

While out photographing the other day, I had the opportunity to use a 35mm f/1.4. So I put it to use doing what it was designed for, shooting wide open in a documentary style. In this case Tommy, was my subject as he was trying out my macro lens and flash.

Two things became obvious while using this lens. The first one was the shallow depth of field I was hoping to get while shooting wide open, was non-existent. I’m comparing this to a 300/400mm f/5.6 which at a similar distance has no detail at all in the background. The second thing that became more obvious after a few frames it that the depth of field is indeed quite shallow. However the out of focus areas still retain some detail, which adds environmental context to the subject of the image. So when using this lens it’s very critical to get that plane of sharp focus on the idea of the image you want to emphasis.

This was my rather poor attempt. The first shot I took of this scene, the camera chose to focus on the moss covered log. So I adjusted the focus point to somewhere near his face. This is the result. It’s still not great since it missed his face and chose to focus on his backpack strap, shoulder and leg. Not really the part I wanted to emphasis.

So my question to all is, where would you place the plane of focus in this image? I chose this camera angle so I could look into the lens of the photographer, so I’m thinking I should have had the plane of sharp focus on the front lens element. Where would you place it and what story are you trying to tell with it?

Equipment: Canon EOS 7D with a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM lens at 35mm EFL.
Exposure: 1/100s, f/1.4 & ISO100.
Processing: LR3 – Portrait raw conversion, white balance, minor colour and contrast adjustments. Crop to 4:5.