For a lot of people who live in Ohio, fall is their favorite time of year. After a long, hot, humid summer, the fall brings cooler temperatures and much lower humidity. People can turn off their air conditioning and open windows. It is also a beautiful time of year when the leaves on trees start to turn from green to all the wonderful shades of yellow, orange, brown and red. As Ohio has many different varieties of trees, the colors can be spectacular.
It is a great time of year for photographers. In addition to the fall colors, this time of year offers many foggy and/or frosty mornings. Photographers love to shoot in these conditions. Photography is all about light, and fog creates some of the most interesting light. Frost creates some special subjects for shooting.
Before I move onto the fall of the year of the covid, I’m going to write about and show my photographs from 2019. In central Ohio, it is difficult to find great landscapes. The city and suburbs don’t offer expansive vistas. To find interesting landscapes, it really requires getting out of the city. If most of your hiking and shooting go on in the city metro park system, it is going to require that most of your photography look smaller. Last fall, I spent a lot of time and energy focusing on a smaller scene. There are still many colors and wonderful light. There is something very special about the colors and textures that arrive when plants begin to decay and go to seed. I began shooting these plants and leaves in much the same way I shoot many of my portraits – shallow depth of field, finding interesting backgrounds of light, color and texture, separating the subject from the background, and seeking compelling ways to light the subject to create a mood.
I’m going to show my fall 2019 photographs in two different blogs. This first blog includes images that I took on two different occasions. The first was from Inniswoods Metro Garden in October and the second is from Highbanks Metro Park in December. I know, December is winter, but when there’s no snow, nature and plants look the same as late fall. There are times when I go out to shoot and I don’t see much. I always see something, but I can be underwhelmed with the results. There are other times when I am surrounded by the most breathtaking sights. It is an exhilarating sensation to photograph this beauty. These two occasions fell into the remarkable category.
Inniswoods Metro Garden
There is a fountain in the park. When I approached it, I noticed that the plants behind it might create an interesting background. I thought if I could freeze the water with a shallow depth of field, it might make for an interesting image. I tried a few different shutter speeds and one of them captured the water as I had envisioned.
I was walking through the woods and began to hear birds chirping. It sounded like they were on the ground. As I walked closer, the chirping got louder and louder, and it became clear to me that there were hundreds, if not thousands of birds not that far away. I lifted up my camera, checked my settings to be sure I could get a decent exposure and kept moving forward. The chirping became loud enough for me to start thinking that what I was doing might not be a great idea. Yet the thought of what I might be able to capture forced me to put away the unsettling Hitchcock scenes. Then with one step, the sound turned to movement. I heard the loud swoosh of wings and they took off all at once across my field of vision. I moved my camera in an attempt to freeze the birds in flight. And then I breathed a sigh of relief that they flew across me, and not at me.
Highbanks Metro Park
When I started my photography education, almost a decade ago, I purchased a Canon T2i. This digital camera has a cropped sensor. It makes the camera very affordable, but the images it allows have relatively limited resolutions. When you have fewer pixels in an image, you also are limited in how much you can crop an image without degrading the photograph. I shot with the kit lens that came with the camera which was an 18 – 55mm lens. I had a lot of experience shooting with a 50mm lens from the reservation. A 50mm lens most closely approximates the field a vision a person has when they observe a scene. This is also called a normal lens. When you have a telescopic lens on a camera, you can change the field of vision of a scene while standing in one spot. When shooting with a fixed or prime lens, you have to move yourself around to change the ways you frame a scene. There are lots of photographers who prefer to shoot with a prime lens and claim that these lenses give them much sharper images.
When I started photography classes, I learned that the world was divided into Canon and Nikon in much the same way that the computer world is divided into Apple and PC/Windows. You can find Canon and Nikon owners who will argue the merits of their camera technology and the deficiencies of the other. You hear similar discussions between Apple and PC adherents. From my perspective, there are lots of idiosyncratic issues that go into how and why you start on one of these paths. My decision to go the Canon route occurred in 1976 when I bought the Canon Ftb. I’m sure the salesperson at Cord steered me in that direction. Once you chose your path, you are likely to remain an adherent. One of the strongest factors determining this loyalty is the cost of lenses. A Canon lens goes with Canon cameras. A Nikon lens is married to a Nikon camera. In some cases, the lenses are more expensive than the camera body. Once you start purchasing lenses, the sunk cost is going to strongly encourage loyalty to a brand. And there are so many other accessories, such as flashes, filters, cable releases, batteries, and chargers. If you have money to spend, these companies have stuff to sell. And almost all these devices are specific to a camera and/or model.
With the advent of mirrorless cameras, Sony has become a major player in the marketplace. Canon and Nikon are both selling mirrorless cameras. The mirrorless cameras use a different lens attachment, but there are adapters that allow you to use your legacy lenses and still support autofocus.
I am going to purchase a mirrorless camera one of these days, and it will be the Canon camera. They are coming out with lots of good lenses for this system. The cameras are much lighter and the technology continues to develop. In the pre-mirrorless world, Canon built camera shake technology into the lenses, but not in the camera bodies. They’ve now included camera shake in the camera body and in the lenses. This is a very big deal if you have issues standing perfectly still and shoot at lower shutter speeds. You could shoot darker scenes by shooting at faster shutter speeds and increasing ISO. I try to use lower ISOs for photograph quality. If I can shoot at 100 ISO, I almost always try to do so. I love the idea that camera shake will allow me to shoot with slower shutter speeds without a tripod.
Cameras are computers. They are unbelievably complicated. There are many menus in the camera that control so many different variables and functions. Once you learn a particular camera brand’s menu system, there is an advantage to sticking with the system you know.
It also takes a lot of time, patience, and practice to learn a focusing system, and all the dials and buttons. There is so much of the technology that I don’t understand or use on my camera, and I’ve had it for almost five years (Canon 5D Mark III). I repeatedly refer to the camera manual and watch instructional videos to refresh my memory or to learn some of the features I use less often. The technology is highly sophisticated and there is so much to understand. And when out doing photography, these technology issues should be automatic. The focus of effort should be on finding and framing the scene, thinking about composition, and creating one’s vision. Manipulating camera technology is supposed to be a task that one can accomplish on autopilot. Thinking about reciprocity (the relationship between ISO, shutting speed and depth of field) should be driven by creativity. Improving one’s skills and becoming a good photographer takes a lot of study, practice, experimentation, and patience.
I learned early on in my digital photography education that it is always best to create the images you want in camera, and not to rely on editing software to get the results you are seeking.
My Canon cameras allow me to shoot jpeg images, raw images or when I push the shutter button, I can get both a jpeg and raw image of the same scene. In my next blog, I am going to explain why I shoot all my images in raw.
These companies make great cameras and they are very expensive. I used to play golf regularly and loved the game. Arthritis has made it difficult for me to play. I learned that buying a new expensive driver won’t fix a slice. I've also learned that purchasing the most expensive camera won’t make you a good photographer. It’s nice to have good equipment, but as with everything in life, developing a skill requires time and effort.
Great pics - a good read.