May 2023
One of my goals in my photography is to present images that appear on a screen or print medium as it appeared to me in the field.
The image above was a difficult composition for me to capture for many reasons. Passing by this scene, I was immediately drawn to the amount of green foliage present. Between the palmettos, young pine trees and clusters of oak coated in green moss, it really stuck out to me as different from the rest of the trail. Beyond just the color, there was also an interesting array of these long and windy oak branches clustered in this one patch.
As I stood there and began to study the scene, it was increasingly more difficult to decide what really drew me to this in the first place. I paced back and forth a couple of times - each step in a given direction offered new and unique compositions, none of which appeared on the back of the camera as what I was experiencing.
I decided it was worth attempting to create panoramic image by shooting multiple frames from left to right then stitching together later in Photoshop. Using my tripod, I shot 4 or 5 images from left to right. Then while I was reviewing these on the back of the camera I realized there was a major focus problem since the tree in the middle was much closer to me than the rest of the scene, and not all images had the same focus distance. So I shot even more images to focus stack later in Photoshop.
Without knowing if it would even work, I'm glad I took the time to collect those images in such a technically efficient way, because it made post-processing this panoramic possible, especially considering my high standards for having sharp focus throughout the image.
This next image was a challenging one to create - for reasons not immediately apparent by just viewing the image. Technically, it is not much more complicated than exposure blending the bright sunrise with the dark shadows of the foreground - something I do often. Outside of the technical challenge, it was the overall experience that made creating this image a challenge.
This is Big Talbot Island State Park, specifically Boneyard Beach. This place had been on my list of places to photograph for quite some time, and living in Orlando, the only real way to make it for sunrise is to stay closeby. For this trip I had decided to camp in the State Park with my brothers, with the plan of waking up in time to get to this beach for sunrise. I don't remember why I choose to do it in August, but in hindsight this was definitely not the best plan for a comfortable experience.
The night before this sunrise I was asleep in my tent when around 2AM a random isolated storm passed through our campsite waking all of us up and soaking almost all of my bedding. I had put a rain cover over the tent before going to sleep, but it failed miserably at stopping the rain. After scrambling to get my only backup clothes out of the tent and into the car (where my camera gear was thankfully stored), I waited along with my brothers for the rain to stop. I returned to my tent and slept on one corner of the air mattress that did not get soaked, using a half-wet blanket as my only cover.
It was actually not hard to wake up in time for sunrise because it's not like I had a better alternative in sleeping in. So I got up and one of my brothers came with me to the Boneyard Beach for the sunrise shot. After the short hike out to the beach, I began scanning around in the blue hour light that precedes dawn for a suitable composition. When the sun eventually came up it was obscured by clouds, which gave me some more time to find this composition. I had setup and was ready for the sun to breakthrough the clouds, although at this point I was doubting that would happen and the whole trip would be a failed attempt in every aspect. Even waiting for the sun to poke through was hard - the humidity was unbelievable and it was hot, still, and the sand fleas were biting!
Even though I had so many challenges in getting this image - the end result is something I'm really fond of. Maybe that's becasue of the memories behind the image that not everyone can see.
This image is one of my most recent, and I am very pleased with how it came out. The most challenging part of creating this image was in the field. I was biking through a trail in the early morning, just after sunrise. With my camera bag packed full of gear, I was prepared for anything. It was pretty foggy this morning so I was excited that I'd be getting some great images with relative ease.
Everything changes when you get into the woods. As soon as I began the trail the fog seemed to not penetrate deep into the woods, so I could not rely on fog for scouting out easy or unique compositions. And with no direct lighting everything looked quite flat and unsaturated. Being the woods, it is already a challenge to make an interesting composition, so I definitely had my work cut out for me.
After biking around for 45 minutes, I came across the scene pictured. Although the composition I captured was not immediately obvious, there was a lot of different things going on in this area. A common theme to my success in creating good compositions is having the patience and slowing down to study the scene. I took maybe 15 or 20 minutes to finally point my camera towards the ensemble you see in the final image - using the blue-gray saw grass in the foreground to create a nice texture to anchor the image, with a nice array of young pine trees in the mid ground and finally the large pine in the background, using the last minutes of the morning's fog to help create depth.
Technically, this image was very simple and minimal post-processing was used. The most challenging and important part of this was the composition. Let me know what you think in the comments below!