A Scenic World

I’ve posted this picture before, but I feel it warrants another view. This is how I looked one day after some serious macro shooting:

Macro shooting isn’t easy. Lots of shot require you to get seriously down into the dirt so that you have the most interesting vantage point. Of course, that doesn’t apply if you’re shooting in a controlled environment with subjects you control, but I like to get out into the countryside and shoot things in the “wild.” And I don’t like carrying around a tripod, so usually it’s just me, my camera, and my lens. There’s always the wind to contend with, and sometimes I sit or lie in the most ungraceful and uncomfortable of poses to wait for everything to be still only to have a mosquito start biting me just as I need to take the shot (important note: it’s possible to ignore mosquitoes that are biting your face. Not recommended, but possible). And then once you’re there, all settled in the mud, you still have to find that one angle that works. A half-inch move to the right can make all the difference. I was reminded of that when I was shooting the little purple flowers that I’ve been posting about here.

I started with this, which is a pretty typical shot for me. I was shooting in aperture-priority @ f/2.8 with my 100mm macro lens. With an ISO 200 and shutter speed of 1/200th, I set the EV compensation to -.7  (almost a full stop darker than the camera thought it should be):

I tend to like slightly underexposed macro shots because I can do so much more with them in the post-processing stage, but looking at this one, I thought that there might be a more interesting angle. I tried to get a little lower to get that flower on the left to take a more prominent role in the picture, but that dark spot that you can see in the top of the photo above became even more prominent. Since I personally subscribe to the idea that backgrounds are just as important as subjects, this wasn’t going to work:

So that meant there was only one thing to do: move to the next flowers. The background looked slightly more promising at a group of three flowers that were to the right of these two. So I took a test shot with my camera still in aperture-priority mode. It’s also important to note that I use spot-metering, so the camera chooses its settings based off a relatively small area in the center of the frame rather than try to expose for the entire frame. So with those settings and with my first attempt at framing these artfullly, I got this:

Meh. Not much I can do with that.

I changed my EV compensation to +.3 and moved around the flower so that the highest bloom was even closer to the camera. At 100mm and f/2.8 and ISO 200, I got a shutter speed of 1/400th for this shot:

Better, better, but that bloom in the back was driving me nuts. Time to rotate around even more and see what I could do about getting a composition I liked. Of course, that meant that the background would change too…

…which it definitely did. It’s almost black, and just a bump in contrast would have made it nearly completely so. But this is definitely one of the benefits of spot metering: because the camera didn’t try to expose for the entire dark frame, the flower I wanted to be well-exposed is (well, slightly under-exposed, but I told the camera to do that). That bloom in the back is still making it hard to let that forward bloom really pop out at you, so time to move again, this time an inch or to clockwise.

NOW we’re getting somewhere! I like how the light is filtering in, but I’m a little worried that the bloom is pointing to the left and the light is to the right. When I think about how I want my eyes to rove over the finished picture, I’m a little worried that the two might compete for attention – the bloom will naturally draw the eyes to the left while the bright portion will draw them to the right. So let’s move up an inch or so and try to put that bright portion behind the blooms:

Well, the bright portion is more where I want it, but leaving the camera set to -.3 EV was obviously a mistake. But look at how you can see the curl of that back bloom now! All that’s needed is to change the EV compensation to +.3 to make the scene brighter…

…and the camera responds exactly the way I want it to. Instead of a shutter speed of 1/1000th, I got 1/250th. Compositionally, the bright bit leads up to the top left, just like the flower. So all I have to do is add a little Lightroom magic (take a look at the two previous posts if you have a strong stomach and lots of free time), and voilà!

I remember when I first started on my lens quest, I didn’t even consider an ultra-wide lens. I thought that 21mm was wide enough for me. It wasn’t until I received the DA 12-24/4 that I started embracing the idea that not all keepers had to have bokeh (yeah, I was quite smitten with being able to have a shallow depth of field for longer than I care to admit).

12mm on an APS-C or cropped sensor isn’t even that wide, really – it’s the equivalent of 18mm on a full-frame camera. But it still offers a full 90° horizontal field of view compared to 67° for the widest view of most kit lenses on a camera with an equivalent sensor (18-55mm).

I’ve had trouble incorporating it into my style, which someone once aptly described as being very much “subject-background-and-nothing-else.” Most wide-angle shots that seem to work best either have

• something really interesting in the foreground, like large rocks on a coastline with the ocean stretched out beyond, or
• feature an eventful sky, which is kind of rare (I usually find it to be all blue or all grey) or
• uniform geometry (think of all the shots you’ve seen of the Vatican’s spiral staircase)

But I’ve worked to find shots that work with this lens, and one of the things I’ve tried to capitalize on is the same sun-flare technique I wrote about with the fisheye lens. It seems you have to be extra careful to have a clean lens, though – while most dust and dirt don’t show up in regular shots, the flare will reveal every last spot on the lens’ surface. It turns out that my lens is filthy, but I didn’t realize that before I took this shot. And as I didn’t bring any cleaning supplies with me on my hasty trip to the US, I’m kind of stuck with what I have at the moment.

Using a tripod while using ultra-wide lenses also seems to be a huge help. Unfortunately, I don’t have a tripod with me at the moment either, so everything I’ve taken recently has either been handheld or set on the ground. A tripod helps in two huge respects. First, it helps to get the horizon straight. While this should always be a priority regardless of which lens you use, it becomes especially important if you want to capitalize on the ultra-wide capacities of the lens. If you have to straighten the horizon in post-processing, you end up losing some of that impact, as most programs crop off parts of the photo to make the horizon straight- and at that point, you might as well have used an 18mm lens.

If you don’t have a tripod, then one of the ways to gain a unique perspective is to set the camera on the ground (pro-tip: do NOT do this on a road that gets a lot of traffic!). But ultra-wides present a problem here too. Depending on the lay of the land, you’re more than likely going to wind up with a photo featuring a huge area of asphalt and very little of your subject. I almost always have a tube of chapstick, so in a pinch, I just slide this under the lens, as far back toward the camera as possible, to get the camera and lens to point up. That’s how I took the following shot:

But I ran into a huge problem when I tried this tactic on a sunny day as we drove back through Georgia. The sun was directly behind the camera, and the lens and camera cast a shadow on the the foreground. Try as I might, I just could not get the lens up high enough to not get its own shadow:

I ended up cropping that bit out before I posted the shot on flickr.

Another thing you have to be aware of when using a super-wide angle lens is the amount of perspective distortion you can get. You can read more about this on wikipedia. For instance, I wanted to take a picture of this abandoned church, but any time you point the camera up, then the base of whatever you shoot is going to look huge and the pinnacle is going to look much smaller than it is in relation to the base. Just taking one step forward or one step back or a step to the left or right changed the resulting image tremendously. In the end, I compromised – I was as close as I could be to get both the steps and the top in the frame, but I wasn’t happy where that bright spot in the sky fell. Ideally  it would have been behind the spire, but that would have meant moving to the right a couple of steps, which would result in the right side of the church looking stretched out. All of this things can be fixed in post-processing if you have the right software, but I’m trying to embrace the eccentricities of the lens.

But the main reason I’ve come to love my 12-24 is because sometimes, there’s just no other lens that can get that once-in-a-lifetime shot you see spreading out before you. I was already dangerously close to trespassing on someone’s property when I took this shot of a tree on a lonely backroad in Georgia – another step or two back, and I’m fairly certain I could have been legally shot by the homeowners. Instead, I was the only one shooting.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure to go out to Cedar Key  with my good friends J-Fin, c_love82, and santefeegret. I left my wide-angle of choice, the 12-24, at home with the intention of using my oft-neglected fisheye instead. At our very first stop, I took a photo of a dock with the fisheye, and I was suddenly inspired for the rest of the trip.

I ended up using an array of lenses, but in the end, the effect was almost always the same: the sun twinkled in a perfect blue sky, and instead of having a huge blob of white in the top half of the photo, I had a star. It’s a pretty easy trick. Instead of shooting at the largest aperture (f/2.4 or f/2.8 or thereabouts), I stopped down the lens a LOT – in some cases, all the way to f/22. It makes for some slow shutter speeds, but there was enough light to manage to handhold.

With the fisheye, I generally just kept it at 10mm and chose an autofocus point in the bottom right-hand corner. I manually exposed so that the sun wouldn’t be over-exposed. The rest of the photo looked very dark in the original but I made sure to shoot at the lowest ISO my camera offers (ISO 100) and then I dodged all the dark sections (the water and the sand) in post-processing:

“At the End of the World”
Pentax K200D, DA 10-17 @ 10mm, f/11, 1/160th shutter, ISO 100

This next shot was also taken with the fisheye, but because I was more concerned with the sandy forefront, the frame was taken up by a lot more of the “dark” stuff than the light and with getting maximum depth of field (hard to do without a tripod, which I didn’t have). Hence the huge difference you’ll see in the camera settings:

“Distortion”
Pentax K200D, DA 10-17 @ 10mm, f/20, 1/40th shutter, ISO 100

I took an all-bokeh version of the same scene using a much longer lens. For this one, I manually-metered the scene again and manually-focused until the image looked the right amount of out-of-focus. The DA 70 produces fanastic bokeh at its largest aperture, and I was more concerned with the reflections off the water than with with the sun in this one, but you can see how it’s just an amorphous white blob when the aperture isn’t stopped down. The shutter maxed out at 1/4000th, the fastest it can go:

“Bokeh Run”
Pentax K200D, DA 70mm, f/2.4, 1/4000th shutter, ISO 100

Compare that to the sun in the photo below, which was taken in manual mode with the FA 31 at an aperture of f/11:

“Last Shack Standing”
Pentax K200D, FA 31mm, f/11, 1/3200th shutter, ISO 100 

The DA 70mm, stopped down to f/22, made an interesting flare in this photo. Unlike the other shots which were basically focused to infinity, this one is of a roof that was no more than 6 feet away.

“Roof”
Pentax K200D, DA 70mm, f/22, 1/320th shutter, ISO 200

And finally, one last shot of the stunning light we were party to yesterday. J-Fin has the DA 55-300, and she was generous enough to let me use it for the majority of the day. I found it much lighter than I expected it to be, especially for its size.  It seemed to focus quickly (especially compared to my D-FA 100mm Macro that I usually use for my long shots!). This is a shot of the light reflecting off the water around the piers taken at 190mm:

“Rain of Fire”
Pentax K200D, DA 55-300 @ 190mm, f/22, 1/2500th, ISO 100