Aspirations

I have been trying to keep up with flowers blooming in our neighborhood, hoping to capture some of them when they are fresh and photogenic. If I can't put in the time to do an exploration of details with a macro lens and a tripod, then I look for quick ways to create a fresh perspective. This shot was hand held. A fisheye lens (180º angle of view across the diagonal of the frame) let me get within a few inches of the Bearded Iris while still showing the trees above and the ground below.

The Iris almost seems as connected to the trees as to its own stalk. I decided that was enough reason for a pretentious title: Aspirations. The flower aspires to be as tall as a tree. I aspire to create photographs worthy of the subjects I find. We both have a distance to go...

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Flowers and perspective

Yesterday I used a wide angle lens and a close perspective to play with the appearance of skimming over and around a patch of azaleas. Today I used a narrow view and more distant perspective to get a very different look.

In a way, I feel that there is more intimacy to these images than the others, perhaps because the individual flowers occupy a larger proportion of the frame. These were photographed between 300 and 400 mm focal length (using a 70-200 zoom with a 2x extender). The moderately high magnification results in shallow depth of field, while the long focal length means the background blur is even more apparent. (A narrow angle of view leads to a more distant camera position for a given subject size. Therefore, the distances from camera to subject and camera to background are relatively similar. This makes the background appear larger than when a wide angle of view leads one to use a close camera position. In that case, the background is proportionally further away, is magnified less, and appears less blurry. This is why telephoto lenses are good for throwing a background out of focus.)

For most of these shots, I was just over a meter - say four feet - away from the closest flower.

Moving my viewpoint just a few inches changed (simplified) the background.

Incidentally, one reason I chose the 70-200 + 2X rather than a "native" 400 mm like the 100-400 zoom is that an extender (also known as a multiplier or teleconverter) preserves the close focusing range of the bare lens.

These are patiently waiting their turn to open.

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Foggy morning

An unusual heat wave in the middle of winter caused Raleigh to be socked in with fairly heavy fog Friday night. This morning (Saturday), though the fog wasn't extremely dense, it persisted through several hours of daylight. I headed for a favorite "urban-rural" area to see what I could see.

Moderate fog can be deceptive. Things nearby look quite clear. It's not at all like the "pea soup" experience of almost losing your hand held in front of your face. Still, the distant parts of a landscape can completely disappear, and most interestingly for images in a two dimensional medium like photography, there is a kind of gradient of clarity. Objects become gradually more diffuse, less detailed, and less colorful when they are further away. It's the same as the basic principle of aerial perspective, only turbocharged by the fog. I wanted to see if I could use these conditions to add a little something to my photos.

The first image is an establishing shot, to give you an idea of the area where I began shooting. This is a stitched panorama of ten overlapping shots. The sky was completely uniform and uninteresting, so I filled it (by my choice of where I stood) with tree branches.

Like a cloudy day, only maybe even more so, a foggy day reflects light in all directions. Some light entered the usually impenetrable shade of the enclosed patio on the end of the old house.

The white fence and distant trees show the signs of aerial perspective.

It was easy for the camera to see into the shade, thanks to the fill light from the fog.

Joggers and walkers appeared out of the fog and disappeared into it.

The birds are fairly clear, while the fencing behind them is half obscured. I think the grass adds a three dimensional effect to the picture simply because it is so much more distinct and saturated with color in the foreground than in the background.

This detail shot doesn't have any obvious characteristics of fog, but the soft, even light did bring out the color contrasts of the awning and the emergency fire gear.

I moved on to the Raleigh Greenway, where this bridge and the trees were complemented by the perspective enhancements of the mist.

A treehouse in the woods! What a fun place for a young person to hide out on a day like this!

As I headed back, others were heading out for some exercise. Here we have six legs jogging into the mysterious distance.

(Lenses used: Canon 16-35/2.8, 24-105/4, 70-200/2.8 - a flexible trio of overlapping zooms, two of them with image stabilization. Among other things, this enabled the slow shutter speed of the last shot, allowing enough motion blur to lend some dynamism to the dog and man.)

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Photographer's Dance

Look up, look down,
turn left, turn around,
pivot right, and day or night,
look for quality of light.
Move in tight,
now back away.
Get it right,
for, night or day,
this may be your only chance.
So do the photo maker’s dance!

- Jess Isaiah Levin

Okay, low grade doggerel, but I take the ideas seriously. On November 19 I noticed that a neighbor's rose bush was blooming, in spite of temperatures just above freezing overnight. My first step was to try to place myself for a good angle to view the highest rose. A cluster of bare branches behind it blurred into a nice simulation of motion, whereas a fairly high shutter speed froze the swaying flower into apparent stasis.

A few steps forward and to one side yielded a simpler background and let me frame the bloom in the crook of a small tree.

Notice how similar the viewpoint of the next shot is to the preceding. I shifted just far enough to allow a  shaft of sunlight to burst into "bloom" for a glamorous backdrop.

Leaving the flowers, I found a leaf that had curled so much it resembled a jester's hat. (Lately I'm noticing a tendency to want my nature photographs to look like something that they are not. Well, not just lately - there's been some of that direction in my work for a long time.) Maybe a jester's hat in an aquarium?

 

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