Photo of the Day 13

September 17, 2012  •  Leave a Comment

So I went out to Harpers Ferry this morning, up at about 4:30 am. Drove about 1 1/2 hours to get there for the sunrise, ah a photographers life, the fog was so thick, I was struggling to see anything, went out for a walk about, a l am no w

ay going to be able to make a landscape shot, I only had 20-30 yards of viz.

Out on the railway bridge looking for some inspiration, saw a whole bunch of great looking webs and searched this one out, not being to tatty or crammed against others.
Needed the tri-pod for this one. Also the 12 -24 mm wide angle lens. Never an easy lens to use this one. It tends to distort the image a lot, also , with it being a wide angle it has a really large depth of Field, so getting areas of the photo to blur and concentrate a viewers gaze, on a particular portion of the photo, this takes a bit of extra care when composing the shot. You really need to anchor the photo, otherwise you just have to much sharpness in the image, the viewers eye needs somewhere to languish, and to take brief forays out into the rest of the photograph. In this, the cobweb serves well, you should find your gaze going back to it then roaming out to explore the rest of the photo coming back again to rest on the spiders web. To make sure the web was obvious enough, I had to make sure the camera was high, to contrast the web against the tree and water.
This is a great technique when using a wide angle, always find something, anything, to put in the foreground, otherwise the eye will not be able to settle anywhere, the picture will be a confusing one.
In this shot I decided to use the wide angle so that a good portion of the dilapidated bridge, and the shrouding fog could lend there collective weight to the tension in the photograph. What I really needed was a cool looking dude in a wide brimmed hat and full length coat to be walking towards the camera, misting breath disappearing in the fog.

The stats: 
1/80 sec, f5 ISO 100, on a tripod with a 12-24mm lens set to a focal length of 17mm. Camera was triggered by an intervalometer.

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