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Last week was, as usual, an exercise in refreshing my memory of photographic techniques and forcing me to follow those techniques to their ultimate conclusions. I am pleased to note that I ended up with several sequences of images that illustrate very nicely some of those processes, and as time allows, I hope to share those progressions to y'all, with pictures.
Case in point, backgrounds and depth of field.
After sunrise at Upper Tipsoo Lake in Mt. Rainier National Park, I wandered around the lake and its meadows, looking for smaller subjects. I found a clump of false hellebore, the leaves of which (in addition to being highly toxic) have a nice shape. Lucky me, the sun had not yet hit this clump, and the dew was thick on the leaves (and the light was still soft).
I knew I wanted a shot of a leaf with a dewdrop pendant, so I started here:
Coupla things going on there--first, of course, is the leaf with the dewdrop, but I've also got some repetition of the leaf theme going on--there's a progression of three parallel leaves, with the dewdrop in the middle. That said, there's also an intrusion of a leaf pointing the wrong direction there at the left edge of the image, and a confusing mass of leading lines and bright and dark spots in the background leaves, all of which distract attention from the central subject.
Next step was to zoom in a bit, to eliminate the intruding leaf. Try #2 looks like this:
I still have the repetition I was looking for, and the dewdrop. The leaf with the dewdrop is much more prominent now, but the background still has a lot of distracting stuff going on. I could open up the aperture to blur out the background, but I will lose sharpness in the top and bottom leaves at the same time. Maybe I should simplify the image from "dewdrop and repetition of leaves" to "dewdrop on leaf".
So I moved the camera a bit, to better isolate the leaf with the dewdrop, and to look at it from an angle that eliminates most of the brighter leaf edges in the background:
This, this is my subject. The dewdrop grabs the eye, the soft curves of the leaf draw it into the picture, and the back curve of the leaf bring it back around into a loop. At f/32 (maximum depth of field), though, the background is still distracting-the straight lines and angles in the background set up a path for the eye that competes with the main subject, and the viewer can't tell which path is the intended one.
Since maximum depth of field didn't work for my purposes, I tried minimum depth of field (f/3.5), and because of that, I was extra careful to get the critical focus on the dewdrop and the sharp leaf tip:
The background is lovely here (and, I think it's worth noting, exactly matches what I saw when I looked through the viewfinder--the lens is always at its maximum aperture unless you are either taking a picture or pressing the depth-of-field preview button, in which case the aperture shifts to the selected capture setting), but note that the back curve of the leaf, which in the previous shot closed the loop of the foreground eye path, has blurred out of existence. That's no good either. :(
Hopefully, there's an aperture in between f/3.5 and f/32 that gives me the back curve of the leaf, without giving me that polygon in the background. I tried every full f-stop between f/3.5 and f/32: f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, and f/22. I'll spare y'all the side-by side comparison of every attempt, though ("A, or B? A, or B?"), and just show you the final selection, which happened to be taken at f/8:
There we are. The back curve of the leaf is there, if not as strongly present as it was at f/32, and while the background isn't perfectly blurred, it's smooth and the darker parts frame the foreground leaf nicely. I am officially happy with this image.
Case in point, backgrounds and depth of field.
After sunrise at Upper Tipsoo Lake in Mt. Rainier National Park, I wandered around the lake and its meadows, looking for smaller subjects. I found a clump of false hellebore, the leaves of which (in addition to being highly toxic) have a nice shape. Lucky me, the sun had not yet hit this clump, and the dew was thick on the leaves (and the light was still soft).
I knew I wanted a shot of a leaf with a dewdrop pendant, so I started here:
Coupla things going on there--first, of course, is the leaf with the dewdrop, but I've also got some repetition of the leaf theme going on--there's a progression of three parallel leaves, with the dewdrop in the middle. That said, there's also an intrusion of a leaf pointing the wrong direction there at the left edge of the image, and a confusing mass of leading lines and bright and dark spots in the background leaves, all of which distract attention from the central subject.
Next step was to zoom in a bit, to eliminate the intruding leaf. Try #2 looks like this:
I still have the repetition I was looking for, and the dewdrop. The leaf with the dewdrop is much more prominent now, but the background still has a lot of distracting stuff going on. I could open up the aperture to blur out the background, but I will lose sharpness in the top and bottom leaves at the same time. Maybe I should simplify the image from "dewdrop and repetition of leaves" to "dewdrop on leaf".
So I moved the camera a bit, to better isolate the leaf with the dewdrop, and to look at it from an angle that eliminates most of the brighter leaf edges in the background:
This, this is my subject. The dewdrop grabs the eye, the soft curves of the leaf draw it into the picture, and the back curve of the leaf bring it back around into a loop. At f/32 (maximum depth of field), though, the background is still distracting-the straight lines and angles in the background set up a path for the eye that competes with the main subject, and the viewer can't tell which path is the intended one.
Since maximum depth of field didn't work for my purposes, I tried minimum depth of field (f/3.5), and because of that, I was extra careful to get the critical focus on the dewdrop and the sharp leaf tip:
The background is lovely here (and, I think it's worth noting, exactly matches what I saw when I looked through the viewfinder--the lens is always at its maximum aperture unless you are either taking a picture or pressing the depth-of-field preview button, in which case the aperture shifts to the selected capture setting), but note that the back curve of the leaf, which in the previous shot closed the loop of the foreground eye path, has blurred out of existence. That's no good either. :(
Hopefully, there's an aperture in between f/3.5 and f/32 that gives me the back curve of the leaf, without giving me that polygon in the background. I tried every full f-stop between f/3.5 and f/32: f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, and f/22. I'll spare y'all the side-by side comparison of every attempt, though ("A, or B? A, or B?"), and just show you the final selection, which happened to be taken at f/8:
There we are. The back curve of the leaf is there, if not as strongly present as it was at f/32, and while the background isn't perfectly blurred, it's smooth and the darker parts frame the foreground leaf nicely. I am officially happy with this image.
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