Other autumn pictures

My autumn depression is not as bad as yesterday's entry suggested: I may not have autumn colour photos, but the other typical autumn subject in nature is present in my photo collection: mushrooms and toadstools. Though I don't know the difference between the two. My dictionary says mushrooms are the edible kinds, toadstool the poisonous ones--never mind, I'm not going to collect any; two-thirds of the species in the Netherlands are on the Red List of endangered species. You can enjoy their beauty by watching--and photographing of course!

The photo, made in Holland a few autumns ago, may be of a mushroom called Oudemansiella mucida (synonym: Collybia mucida, teaches the Dutch part of the Wikipedia). I made a close-up with selective sharpness (f/4.0) to emphasise the fragility and the subtle colour; not for nothing the Dutch name would translate as 'china/porcelain mushroom'.

One thing had to be retouched, I admit: there was a bit of cobweb hanging from the hood which I clone-stamped away in Lightroom (who needs Photoshop?). Forgotten to 'look around' my subject when I took the picture! But if I hadn't told you, you would not have known, would you? If you find the spot where this photo was retouched, you earn a bottle of wine. Come and get it! ;-)

Between f/2.8 and f/64 (1)

At Earthboundlight a blog entry appeared this week to answer a reader’s question: ‘Why would you want to have an f/2.8 lens?’ Bob Johnson, the author of Earthboundlight, looked at this question from the landscape photographer’s point of view. In Ansel Adams’s days, with the big plate cameras, you needed f/64 to get the ‘grand vistas’ sharp from front to end—that’s why Ansel Adams was member of the Group f/64. Current lenses ‘only’ go to f/22 (sometimes f/32), so landscape photographers tend to use those small apertures—and a tripod, because you get long exposure time at small lens openings. Luckily landscapes tend to stay in place long enough ;-)

What Johnson did not say was that at smaller formats, you get the same depth-of-field at lower aperture numbers. That is why it is so easy (relatively!) to make macro photos with compact cameras: with their tiny sensors, they get that flower detail all sharp at full opening, where a DSLR (especially a full-frame one) must stop down to f/22 to get the same. So for a landscape to be sharp from foreground to horizon, you can make do with f/22 rather than f/64 on a DSLR—if you want it all sharp.

It gives a classical look to—especially—landscape photos to have them sharp all over. Give it a sepia toning and you’d almost believe it was a 19th century picture! But most of the time, you don’t need sharpness all over to get the effect you want: selective sharpness is much more creative. You don’t need that grass and branch in the foreground to be sharp for them to have the effect of suggesting more depth to the photo with the manor house in the background.

Selective sharpness also works in close-up photos: this minuscule blueberry flower was all you need to see sharply—it conveys the spring feeling much better with the strong bokeh (‘unsharpness’) than a picture bewilderingly full of sharp details would have done.

Both these photos were taken at f/2.8—I only have one lens that opens so widely. The wide aperture has the advantage that you get more light into the viewfinder, so you see more clearly and you (or the camera) can focus more precisely. Moreover, f/2.8 often signals professional lenses, which also have other advantages, like minimum distortion of straight lines, minimum flare, minimum chromatic aberration and other flaws. Their only disadvantages are weight (that kept me from choosing one as my standard lens)—and price…

Sitting ducks and moving targets

Bumble bees may be among the slowest-flying insects, but it is not easy to catch them quite right! This weekend in the garden I tried, but the only reasonable photo is the one you see here. It takes a lot of practice, hi-speed photo bursts and still you need luck. Moreover, when concentrating on shooting the bumble bee, of course I forgot to "look around" my subject, so that now we have this distracting light-green blob of the day-lily's leaf in the background, precisely where it bothers most. And the so-called slow-moving bumble bee still was too fast a moving target for a sharp picture at 1/750^th of a second. So much frustration hidden behind a photo that still is decent enough to dare and show it on the Web!

The second one, a dragonfly, is the sitting duck of this entry's title. A few minutes before, this dragonfly (or one that looked very much like it) laid eggs in the pond and I was too late to get the camera from the house. But tired of laying eggs, or just waiting for prey to fly by, it sat quietly on a reed and I could get close enough for a 'portrait'. Admittedly, I still had to crop the photo to avoid the 'Japanese flag' effect, because the tele-zoom has 1.5 meter as its minimum distance.

Black-and-white in colour, or a dandelion and levels of meaning

Conventional wisdom has it that photos of patterns and structures are prime targets for black-and-white. The dandelion of this week's blog was precisely such an object, I thought when taking the picture, but when I saw it on the computer screen, I did not change it from its original colours. The brownish, unfocused background adds something to it. Without this collective of seed ends in their original colour, I found the photo too abstract, too much shouting out that it wanted to be an artistic photo rather than a real picture of a flower. Now, with colours, I think its artistic value is more subdued--and heightened by that very fact. It now is a photo with two layers of meaning (at least): the seedhead itself and the pattern of star-form lines.

At a third level of meaning--if you want to go that far--the colour photo is a symbol of the transience of life, precisely because it refers more clearly than the black-and-white version to the seedhead itself. For the seedhead is destined to let go of the seeds at the first wisp of wind, of course.

The second photo here was not quite as good as the first one (in my eyes) for technical reasons: it lacks depth-of-field in the centre. But it help illustrate the point: this one, although also a close-up and also playing with the star-form patterns, is obviously a dandelion even in black-and-white and does not lose its layers of meaning by the reduction of colour to black-and-white.

By the way, you can see I am influenced by having begun to read a book I just bought: Jeffrey, Ian. 2008. How to Read a Photograph: Understanding, Interpreting and Enjoying the Great Photographers. London: Thames & Hudson. He finds so much more meaning in "simple" pictures, that you almost start to think your own photos have meaning(s), too ;-)

Close-Up and (Im-)Personal

Getting close to my idea of what makes a picture worth showing, is picturing a (little) bit of reality, something you and I and everyone may walk past daily, but that you never looked at in this way. Close-up and macro photography of inanimate, impersonal objects holds this type of charm for me. 'This way' and 'charm' are meant to avoid the word 'beauty'. Of course, an object may be beautiful in obvious ways, but I think I often prefer the hidden beauty of decay, of past glory.



Take this close-up of some kind of agricultural machine, shot in the neighbourhood of an old shed in a rural part of Holland. You maybe never saw how it had 'lived' and worked, grown old, used, worn-down, and rusted. It may be paradoxical that this has to do with the passage of time: how can you show time in a still picture? The stillness and restfulness of this machine part is emphasised in the simple and quiet compostion: in a single plane, parallel to the plane of the picture and with diffuse natural light. Two bolt-like things form an imaginary, visual, practically horizontal line. To the right there then is a vertical line to break--and in that way at the same time stress--the horizontal main line in the composition. A little bit of Mondriaan in a real-world object.

Yet the rust and wear show clearly that this thing has been out and about for a long time. The bolts or axes or whatever they are, are completely rusted and can never be undone anymore. Moreover, in the composition, the imagined horizontal line between the bolts is not quite horizontal and that gives some movement to the picture; movement is time. So both object and composition tell about time, its passage, and what this has done to the object.

That, in turn, makes the inanimate object something personal to me, worth looking at, worth showing to you.