Riversong Readings: Juxtaposition
To mark the official launch of my newest ebook, Riversong: Creative, Holistic Approaches to Photographing New River Gorge, I am doing a series of blog posts featuring excerpts from the book. These will be varied in nature, but today’s excerpt is pulled from the technical discussion on one of my most popular images from the book:
:juxtaposition: A bonsai-like rimrock pine tree perched high above the New River Gorge in West Virginia.
:juxtaposition:
Shutter Speed 1/60 sec
Aperture f/11
ISO 400
Focal Length 40mm
Season Winter
Time 4:30pm
Location Endless Wall
“I visited this location repeatedly during my month in the gorge. This is generally a practice I really love, seeing the same scene under different or even just slightly different conditions, and refining and tweaking my compositions each time, based either on the conditions or on my own analysis of what was right and wrong with images made in the past. I am certain I would have returned more often had it not been for the extreme conditions – bitter cold, ice, snow, and wind all accompanied each of my various hikes out here. I do also want to say, this is a location that can be very risky, as there are sheer drop offs everywhere. I ALWAYS put safety first, and am hyper mindful of every move I make. I certainly needed to get close to the edge to make these images, but I did so safely, sitting, or crouching with microspikes on for grip given the conditions. Don’t risk your life for an image, friends.
This is an image in which I wanted to maximize depth of field. Generally I shoot using the hyperfocal technique, getting everything in focus in a single shot. But here, I had a very close subject and a very distant background, with nothing in between. It was critical that I get the tree in sharp focus, and I preferred the same for the background. So I shot this with a focus-stack in mind, meaning I composed on my tripod and shot twice, same settings for both, but with focus on the tree in one shot, and on the gorge wall in the second one. I combined the two in Photoshop to get maximum sharpness front to back. I have limited patience for this sort of post-processing, but felt it was necessary here. Using f/8 or f/11 gives me the sharpest image with this lens, hence that choice in my settings (had I wanted to try to capture this in a single shot, I would have used a much smaller aperture).
I composed this slightly differently each time I visited, but the main image on the prior page is the one I think is most successful, as it depicts the river in a very pleasing way, tucked in on the side and not at all obscured. I also think the fluffy snow is the most beautiful of the conditions I encountered. For comparison, I’m including the variants below for you.”
Variant of :juxtaposition:
Variant of :juxtaposition:
Cover, Riversong: Creative, Holistic Approaches to Photographing New River Gorge