Was dragged away from posting last week due to a absolutely insane week, but things are back to usual now, and I wanted to get back on here without wasting any time. A combination of factors is making shooting time very precious: the change to Daylight Savings Time makes sunset a very early venture again and brings sunset right into the diner hour; flu and sickness season is settling into the northeast; and before long there will be snow on the ground.
In this change if seasons I find it important to take time where I can get it and to capture scenes where I find them. We are without the leaves but before the snow, and while that may make for a stark landscape, it also opens up images that wouldn’t otherwise be captured. So in that spirit I ambled around the pond at Abington Area Community Park for a little while before parking myself in an Adirondack chair on the dock to watch the moon rise.
I felt like working light tonight, so I grabbed the G10. No lenses, no tripod – everything was shot hand-held with an emphasis on being as steady as possible. Looking back at this first one, the pattern of light on the leaves made me think that the flash had been engaged. But a check of the metadata tells me no, that’s just the ambient. What was I going for here? Angles, lines, shapes of light against shadow.
As the moon began to rise, I was faced with two problems. First, the lens on the G10 doesn’t have near the reach needed to make the moon big enough to stand alone in the frame. And second, without some HDR manipulation, there’s no way I was going to capture the full dynamic range from the lit moon to the shadowed shore. The trick then was to place the moon in the photo as an accent piece, in such a way that it wouldn’t matter that it was blown out.
How about a little B&W action? Take the dark scene, lit mainly by the ugly artificial security light on a storage shed and make something more of it. Does the cottage ambiance come across? I hope so, but either way, I think this is a good example of how to take a somewhat bland, somewhat cluttered scene and turn it into something with a little extra punch. B&W won’t always save the day like that, but sometimes it will help boost the feeling of an image to the next level.
Two thoughts to end with. First, the classic moon-reflecting-on-water shot. Still no hope of managing the dynamic range, so we boost the aperture to the max (f/8), drag the shutter to let the headlights on the road stream out, and pray like hell that combination of shooting from the solid chair and the built-in IS system will hold the scene steady for the 1/2 second needed. Why the headlights? They’re something different, and instead of a reflected moon, the image shows something else. Here’s the lesson – instead of always subtracting stuff from a scene to “purify” it, try adding stuff.
And finally the walking-back-to-the-car shot. This is what happens when I’m cold and hungry but don’t really want to be done yet. And it’s a state of mind I’d encourage in others. Most of the time this kind of motion-blur shot turns out looking awful. But now and then you get lucky. I won’t go so far as say this is some sort of artistic abstract image. It’s probably not something I’d even put up as a desktop background. But I do like the waves, the color and texture of the image.
All shot with a Canon G10, ISO 200, variable shutter speed and aperture.
