Attitudes on Aperture

It's been a quiet few days due to some iffy weather and some busy days. I did get out a couple times this weekend, though, to Carkeek Park in Seattle and the Bob Heirman Wildlife Preserve near Monroe.

One thing I've been trying to do lately is choose apertures more consciously and specifically, something that will show up in this blog post. When I first bought my DSLR, I always shot at the widest aperture. Later, I started shooting in two modes - wide open for pictures with selective focus and narrower (I think usually f/11) for pictures in which everything was in the same plane of focus. Only seldom did I deviate from this approach. This year I've tried to be more intentional about aperture, trying to find the right depth of field or the right balance between definition and blur in the background depending on the needs of the image.

I suppose I also owe a bit of credit to the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. He refers to f/22 as the "storytelling aperture" due to the wide depth of field and unique perspective it can afford In typical hyperbolic style, he wrote that if you aren't willing to shoot at f/22 then you aren't a serious photographer, or something like that. Perhaps it's a strong statement, but since I read it my photography has improved. I've become more willing to try narrow apertures and wide depths of of field.

I took the picture you are about to see at f/18. Even though it's still a selective focus situation, the wider depth of field keeps some definition in the background, thus enabling the perspective of the daisies within the orchard. It needs some lightening up...but at f/18 at ISO 500, my shutter speed was only 1/30 sec, barely enough to handhold (which I had to do to get this low). I didn't want to sacrifice sharpness by lengthening the shutter speed, depth of field by widening the aperture, or quality by boosting the aperture even further.

This one is similar, though not quite as striking:

I got a few interesting closeups as well. In each of these, I stopped the aperture down just a bit (f/4, f/5, and f/6.3, respectively). In the first, I wanted some definition in the leaves surrounding the buds; in the second, I wanted the grass blade to gently fade out of focus. In the third, I wanted a discernible amount of the daisy to be in focus, without picking up any of the background behind the flower.

I've started to realize that photography is not so much about depicting what a scene "looks like" and more about depicting what a scene "says." What is the scene saying to you, and how can you communicate that through the image? Verbally, it sounds like a strange distinction, but that is the best way I can describe it.

Here are a few from Bob Heirman Wildlife Preserve. If anything, they are a bit too...green. After the first of this set, there's not a whole lot of color contrast, which would probably help the images. Perhaps some tasteful editing would help accentuate the contrasts between the greens, but it's not necessarily something I should count on. The angles are kind of interesting...but the color schemes are a tad bland. I've learned that forest color contrasts are hard to capture in photographs.