On a recent trip to Death Valley and Zion national parks, we were struck with the wonders in the parks and at the same time marveled at some of the modern photographic equipment that makes recording of those wonders pretty wonderful itself.
An unusually wet winter in the Southwest desert brought an abundance of wildflowers. In fact, they were at their 50-year best this year, a point made repeatedly by the news media. One result of the media attention about Death Valley was an abundance of people. It was packed to overflowing with flower lookers. Photographers with tripods were tripping over one another in some areas. We found ourselves wondering where all the people came from...
In Death Valley the Desert Gold (Gerea canescens) flowers from a distance looked like some giant had smeared the ground with mustard. Once we walked into the large patches of flowers, we faced photographic challenges to producing a good image. The desert plants were spaced 3 to 4 feet apart and were about 1 to 3 feet tall. The persistent desert wind produced almost constant flower movement.
The picture I visualized showed entire plants close to the camera with the yellow flowers stretching into the distance and the colorful mountains and blue sky behind them. Of course, I wanted all this to be in sharp focus. The camera needed to be positioned at the proper height to show the layer of yellow flowers and be tilted down enough to show the gravel soil.
After finding a patch of flowers of the desired density and arrangement, I use a polarizing filter at about half strength to decrease the glare on the plant parts and enhance the blue sky. Unfortunately, using the filter meant losing almost two f-stops of light. The 17-85mm lens I had chosen showed the scene I wanted, but when set at f/16 and 1/40 sec, to give the necessary depth-of-field, the shutter speed was not fast enough to freeze the wind-blown flowers. The lens used at its wide-angle settings also caused the polarized sky to vary in density across the frame. My mind searched for a way to solve these problems so I could get the picture I had envisioned.
The Canon EF 45mm tilt-shift f/2.8 lens in the camera bag came to my rescue. I was able to tilt the lens to set the plane of focus from the foreground gravel to the distant mountains. This allowed me to use an f/8 and 1/160 sec exposure (since I didn't need to use f/16 for the depth-of-field). This gave me the additional shutter speed I needed to freeze the wind-blown flowers. The 45mm lens used vertically also took in less sky, which kept the polarized density of the blue sky even across the frame.
The picture accompanying this article is the result of these decisions. Investigate the wonders of using tilt-shift lenses if you like this type of image. You can start your investigation at www.photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift/.
I discovered a new digital photo aid on this trip as well. Digital camera users can run into problems with inconsistent and inaccurate white balance and exposure, and when this happens you end up spending time at the computer trying to find the proper color correction to recreate the scene photographed. The "auto white balance" setting on digital cameras does a pretty good job of keeping up with the scene's coloration, but the auto settings can be fooled. It can be frustrating trying to clean up an image with bad color.
I have tried including a white balance card in an image and then adjusting the white balance of related images on the computer using this card as a reference, and it works. But this approach still requires additional computer time.
Enter the Wallace Expo/Disc (see http://goinside.com/03/11/expod.html for a review). The Expo/Disc is placed over the lens and the picture you take is basically a grey card image that can be used to set the digital camera's custom white balance. Once set, the images that follow are white balanced for that scene and lighting. And no computer time is need to color correct the images! The Expo/Disc (http://www.expodisc.com) can also be used to set the proper exposure and to check the accuracy of your camera''s meter. This is a great photo tool!
We recently discovered a new lens, the Lensbaby 2.0 (http://www.lensbabies.com). The best description of this lens is from their web site: "Lensbabies bring one area of your photo into sharp focus, and you can move that ‘sweet’ spot of focus around the picture by bending the flexible lens tubing. You will get a unique new look, with gorgeous blurring, glowing highlights, and subtle, prismatic color distortions, all without software manipulations." Plus we find the Lensbaby fun to use!
This manual focus lens (actually, finger focus) takes a little time to master and is not quick like an autofocus lens. But the pictures produced are different and allow you to stretch your creativity. Some professionals are using the Lensbaby to produce some very interesting images (see the galleries on the website given above). We are still playing with our Lensbaby and have made some pleasing images. Wildflowers should be marvelous subjects for this fun lens. For more Information, see http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews_lensbaby.php and http://www.dpreview.com/news/0503/05032201lensbaby_2.0.asp.
We close our article this time reminding you to enjoy the wonders of nature and check out some of the marvelous photographic tools and toys available today, such as the tilt-shift lens, the Lensbaby 2.0 and the Expo/Disc. Hopefully, you'll be marvelously pleased with your photographic images!