We had fantastic views over Ullswater and some amazing skies over the Helvellyn Range that I spent a happy hour shooting.
On days like these, with nature putting on such a great show, I tend just keep shooting and worry about the editing later. One of the things love about shooting digital is the fact that I don't need to watch the frame counter and ask myself whether a shot is worth spending money on. Our film is limitless and we can take pictures just to test ideas. Once the light and the view start to come together, I'm pretty much constantly shooting, testing exposures, trying compositions, looking for that one right moment.
While the digital revolution means we don't have to worry about the cost film any more, it is important to remember that digital frames do carry a cost in terms of both time and drive space The many of thousands hours I must have spent editing digital files have made me fairly selective over what I shoot. Over the course of the day I took around 100 frames, almost all of them in them in the space of that one hour when the magic starts to happen. From that 100 I'm left with the five that I've posted. Out of these, two or maybe three will make it through to proof printing, and one of those may just turn out to be in this year's New Work Show. Maybe.
I shot all of these with my old faithful 80-200mm f2.8. It's a heavy beast of lens that I hate carrying, but that's easily forgiven on days like these. Shooting landscape with a long lens it's all too easy to forget to move, but so important to think about your position and putting yourself in the right place to make all the elements of the picture line up. On this day in particular, elevation turned out to be critical; my starting position was higher than the fells that I wanted to appear in the foreground, meaning that I to crop them out altogether, or lose the best bits of the sky. Heading downhill a little way brought the foreground up in the frame and allowed all the layers fit together. The old Two-Foot Zoom in action.
Like most of my images, all of these were shot handheld. In daylight with a fast lens I've got a plenty fast enough shutter speeds perfectly sharp images without a tripod. And shooting a long lens at large apertures isn't as counter-intuitive as may sound for landscape work; a long lens mean a narrow field of view, which means that our foreground isn't actually very close to us at all. In fact the 'foreground' in these images is a ridge on the opposite side of the valley from me, at least 400 metres away. With any lens, when we focus on something up close we start with a tiny depth of field (think of the paper-thin depth of field you see in many macro shots). As we turn the barrel to focus farther away, the depth of field grows exponentially. The depth of field scale app on my iphone tells me that with my big lens set at 140mm, and focused on a subject 360 metres away everything from around 175 metres to infinity should be sharp at f2.8. At f5.6, where this lens is about as happy as a lens can get, I'm looking at a world that is sharp from 90 metres all the way to deep space.
Before & Since:
The images are below, for the geeks that have got this far, are the edited and untouched versions of one image...
As anyone who's been on one of my workshops would be able to tell you, these kinds of exposures are best set using the histogram to make sure that we've got all information we need in the RAW file. The unedited capture is just our starting point, not the finished work. Because the RAW file contains all the tonal range we need we've got a huge amount of scope when it comes to editing the contrast and tonal range of our finished picture. But more about that sort of thing soon...
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| Unedited File |
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| Finished Shot, Edited in Lightroom |
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