other stuff » One Fine Picture

Photographing the Arch

day photography, other stuff No Responses »

Aug 062011

Arches have been around for over 2,000 years and during that time have frustrated artists from many persuasions — painters, sculptors, and photographers seeking to capture their appearance.
Should I photograph the entire arc or just a portion? What’s the best angle? How much of the foreground to include?

Arches

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Most of these questions depend on the situation and your options at the time. If you’re snapping a shot of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, chances are that you won’t be able to control the scene as you would in a small community neighborhood.

The only ‘rule’ I’ve heard is that you’re not supposed to edge crop a picture of anything with curves. Either leave some space above the curve or cut right into the curve. The same holds true for people especially with portraits.

Cropping Arches

As rules go in art, this sounds reasonable and you can easily crop back and forth to see what works best in your image. In the image below, there wasn’t much room at the top so I had to cut across the arc. Another option is to retake the shot and leave about a foot of purple wall at the top but this looked dull.

Now for my favorite arches, those yellow ones — if I could only get that Ronald McDonald fellow to move out of my picture….

Seagulls on the Beach

other stuff No Responses »

Jan 042011

During the winter, the beach is a great place to capture some colorful images while avoiding the crowds. On this day a cold moist wind rushed across the lake, and just after the midday sun disappeared behind some clouds, hundreds of seagulls fanned out across the sky.

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I used a 300 mm lens and a 1.4X teleconverter. This gave me an effective range of 420mm. I might have used a wide-angle lens but I decided to focus on just a few birds – plus that lens was left at home

Using a teleconverter means a loss of one stop of light, so even though my 300mm was 5.6, this bumped it up to f 8.0.

When I checked the images on my computer screen, they had too much detail — you could see the birds in the distance nearly as well as the two in the foreground.

No problem though. Some minor post-processing adjustments easily created some blurriness and gave the scene a nice depth of field. I duplicated a layer in Photoshop and added a Gaussian blur. Then I masked the two birds of interest with a soft brush so they would blend in with the background.