This is a photograph I took on the same outing to White Pines that I took the Columbine photo I featured in this post. While the Columbine photo is probably one of my favorites for the year, this one qualifies as kind of a “meh” at best. But it does serve to illustrate one of my key ideas of photography — it’s all one big balancing act.
Nikon D800, Rokinon 14mm f2.8
There’s a lot that I like about this photo. It’s a really nice patch of wild geraniums in a pretty spot with lovely overcast light. On an idea level, I quite like it. On an execution level, there’s a lot to be desired.
Before I jump into the failures, it’s probably good to list the settings I used for the shot to provide a basis for the discussion:
Nikon D800
Rokinon 14mm f2.8
ISO 400
1/80th shutter speed
f8 aperture
Lens focused at minimum focus distance
The biggest problem of the photo is that it doesn’t have enough depth of field. That fact is exacerbated by the fact that the bokeh out of the Rokinon 14mm is quite distracting. I’m guessing that the designers of a 14mm lens probably didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the blur characteristics of the lens would look like. That makes sense. It’s a rare condition indeed where large amounts of background blur would show up in a photo taken with a 14mm lens, especially one stopped down to f8 as this was. However, my main subject is the prominent geranium on the left side of the frame which is behind the minimum focus distance that the lens was set to. It serves to illustrate my idea that photography is a game of balance. When one gets everything right, it’s a Nadia Comăneci perfect 10 on beam. Get parts wrong and one falls off the beam.
The biggest limiting factor for me was that there was a strong weather system moving through northwestern Illinois on this day and that brought along some stronger winds. 1/80th was the bare minimum that I could get away with before motion blur from the wind would ruin the shot and even that took a lot of patience to wait for the quietest moments I could get. This was empirically determined with test shots. This limitation was essentially my 4″ wide balance beam that I had to base everything else I did on.
I chose an aperture of f8 based on the shutter speed I was limited to and my desire to keep the ISO as low as possible. I would have liked to stop down to f16 for this shot but that would have left me shooting at ISO 1600 for my limiting shutter speed. In retrospect, going with that or even compromising on f11 at ISO 800 would have been a better idea. Wiggle number one on the my beam exercise.
The second mistake was using the minimum focus distance of the lens. I did so to make sure that nothing in front of the lens was out of focus. While out of focus blur can work in backgrounds, it’s a lot harder to make foreground blur look good. So I skewed the depth of field towards anything close to me and let the main subject fall in the depth of field behind my point of focus. In retrospect, there’s really nothing in front of the main subject flower in the photo, so I could have focused a bit behind that flower and let it fall into the depth of field in front of my point of focus. This would have moved the depth of field much futher into the frame. Wiggle number two in my beam exercise.
The third mistake probably relates to how I’ve been thinking with cameras lately. I’ve really been skewing towards large format lately. This composition is really made for large format. I would have used lens tilt or, more likely, back tilt to change the plane of focus and put the Scheimpflug principle to work for me (back tilt would have also had the added benefit of using perspective to exagerrate the size of the things in the lower half of the frame — the flowers — for a more dynamic presentation of that part of the image). I don’t have lens tilt or back tilt available with my Nikon kit. Back tilt simply isn’t possible because the sensor is in a fixed position in the camera. If I owned a tilt shift lens, I could have at least used lens tilt to help with the focus issues. The lens I would have wanted (the Nikon PC Nikkor 19mm f4E) is way outside of my means, though. So, I was stuck with traditional wide angle optics for the Nikon. And I didn’t compose to that system and lens. Oh dear, wiggle number three and I’ve fallen off the beam. That’s a minimum half point deduction.
While this is not a perfectly executed routine, I’m not terribly upset about it. The Columbine shot I referenced earlier had an even bigger set of challenges to overcome and I think I balanced that one very well indeed. As I said above, it’s one of my favorite photos of the year so far. As with the beam in gymnastics, constant practice and dedication to improving is the only way to better one’s photographic balance. Even then, sometimes one is going to fall off. The important parts are getting back on the beam and being happy when one really executes a routine. I did both with the Columbine shot and that makes me happy about this particular outing!
3 Comments
Excellent Blog Chris. Very informative. Makes me realize how little I know. Thanks for posting.
Chris, Do you have a check list you use when you do a shoot, or is it just a mental check list? You mentioned test shots. Do you look at a scene you want to shoot and mentally go through what looks like may be possible issues? You seem to go through this here with your comments about the light, ios, f stops etc. Do you take notes on your test shots beyond camera settings?
Hi, Ted. Thank you for the very kind comments. No real checklist — just a mental one. In this case, I took a few test images because the wind was blowing more than I would like and I wanted to see what kind of shutter speed I could get away with.
Film shooters will say things like “film makes you a better photographer because you’re not spraying and praying like digital shooters do.” While I see their point, I also think it’s a very apples and oranges comparison. I use each medium to its strengths.
In a digital shot like this, I had nothing to lose other than a few shutter cycles on the life of my D800 and it gave me information that was critically important to making the shot work. I’m far more likely to experiment with odd compositions or techniques with digital because it doesn’t cost anything and I can see the results in real time. That allows me to correct for things in the field. That immediacy of feedback lets me experiment quite a bit with very little cost of entry.
When I shoot film, I’m in a completely different mindset about it. Because each image is going to cost me, I’m far more contemplative about everything. The result is that my “hit rate” with film is much, much higher than digital. And that rate goes up in relation to the size of the film I’m shooting. I really like that aspect about film. But I also find that it makes me a far more cautious photographer because of it.
Honestly, it kind of comes back to the balance thing that was the subject of this post. I try to balance my style of photography against the tools that I have with me on a given day. Film purists may scoff at the idea of burning frames just to test something like shutter speed -vs- wind considerations but I’m a better photographer for “wasting” shots like those. Because of that, I don’t put a lot of faith in such critiques.