Wide Angle, Hard Work

The more I'm using the 70-300mm telezoom, the more I notice how hard it actually is to make good photos with the wide angle lens. This photo was taken at 18mm (12mm DX), and I was really only about half a meter away from the tree trunk, with all of the tripod sections collapsed and the tripod set up in the mud of the small creek that connect the first and the second pool of the Huckinger See area:


Creek and Fallen Tree at Dusk

The first obstacle is to get a good position: a) you need to be really close to some sort of main subject, or else everything will be just tiny and small and lost in the amount of surroundings that the wide angle lens captures (if the photo gives the viewer the impression that he/she is right in the scene, its good); and b) its important that the camera is at level - if its tilted up or down, the keystone distortion will be very pronounced at very short focal lengths. For the above photo, it meant to get down really low and crouch behind the viewfinder on the forest soil. :-}

The second difficulty is directly related to the first - at these very close distances to the focus point you have to focus carefully and stop down the lens a lot (that was f/16 above). A depth of field preview button helps - even if it turns the viewfinder very dark its possible to make small corrections to the focus in order to get the maximum depth of field (hyperfocal distance).

I find lenses with instant manual override of the AF (like the AF-S Nikkors) really helpful, just like detaching the AF from the shutter button as described earlier here. And I've set my camera to shutter priority in all modes for that reason - I don't really want the camera's internal focus control to block releasing the shutter and hinder me from capturing the scene once everything is good just because the stupid thing thinks there's nothing in focus!

Last not least, the exposure itself - I noticed that with so many things in the frame, its quite likely that pattern/matrix metering will have a hard time to really select the best exposure. Its better to use center weighted metering on the important area of the frame (which will still be very large, anyway), and/or use bracketing and careful control of the histogram and the highlights.

And all this takes time. And its a good time, too. Its really strange how my perception has shifted: I can hardly imagine to take photos freehand anymore, even with VR lenses. I simply know now that working with a tripod carefully will always result in sharper images, and the extra time that is needed to set it up also shows in the composition and framing (IMHO:-). The tripod has become my best friend - half a year ago it was just the other way around...

PS: this is the same scene as shown in the january album of the Huckinger See and the same tree trunk as shown in the "Pool and Fallen Tree" photo series in the Huckinger See album (which I just updated with some new photos).