BACK TO BASICS CHALLENGE 7 - LANDSCAPE IN 8

[lynnh]

NOTE: THE BACK TO BASIC CHALLENGE HAS BEEN CHANGED TO EVERY OTHER WEEK TO ALLOW PARTICPANTS TIME TO FIND AND TAKE THEIR BEST SHOT.

Back to Basics Informal Meet-up
Repeat after me: “I will not be a lazy photographer.”

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Landscape in 8 ( f/8 that is )

Modern Lenses and Their Sharpest Apertures - Finding a Sweet Spot

Typically, most lenses have mediocre performance at either end of their aperture ranges. Opened all the way up to say F/2.8 you’ll often get chromatic aberrations, i.e. color “misalignments” at the pixel level. Stopped all the way down, you’ll get diffraction, i.e. softness/diffusion at the pixel level.

A long time ago in a format far, far away… that format being 4×5 film, the conventional wisdom said that we should set our lens aperture between F/16 and F/32 in order to maintain maximum depth of field, i.e. focus. But the technological advances achieved in modern lens and digital camera design have certainly enabled us to create hyper-real photographs.

An important element of landscape photography is ensuring that all of the key elements within your composition are sharp. This can often include foreground objects that are a matter of meters from your camera as well as background elements that can be kilometers away. Therefore, to achieve this, you need to ensure your depth of field is large enough to render everything of interest, suitably sharp.

Your Assignment ~

Take two Landscape photos, whether a park or in the countryside from the same vantage point. (best with a tripod but not necessary for this challenge)
Use f/8 for the first photo and f/11 for the other. Post the photo that seems sharper.

If you would like to discuss your experience, please do. We can learn from it.

Our goal is to get our best shot through the camera and not the computer, so please limit processing to rotate, level, crop. If you shoot in raw, you may adjust your photos as necessary.

Commenting - lets try to give support to one another and point out what we like about the resulting photo(s).

If you have criticism, keep it constructive and hide the comment.

Deadline to post for this assignment is Saturday, August 23rd.

[lynnh]

Leveled, slightly cropped and a bit of contrast added. I was pleased with the details from front to back. Could be slightly sharper... tripod might have helped that, but this is a 'soft' lens.

[john_lamb]

Sorry Lyn. We have had a week of south-westerly winds from Polar regions, plus rain, hail and snow. No chance to get out and about.
I appreciate you effort to keep the weekly challenges going.

[timbg]

I took three shots as follows:
http://www.pbase.com/timbg/image/157102826 1/125sec f/8.0 at 32mm iso100

http://www.pbase.com/timbg/image/157102827 1/100sec f/10.0 at 32mm iso100

http://www.pbase.com/timbg/image/157102828 1/60sec f/22.0 at 32mm iso320

The camera changed the shutter speed and the ISO (aperture mode). The only difference I noticed was an increase in contrast (especially the sky) as the f number increased.

The photos were taken within seconds of each other from a parking lot in a park. I purposely included the guard rail in the foreground.
As for a "sweet spot" - the Zeiss lens is very sweet! I notice that my photos don't need any extra sharpening in Lightroom. 24.3mp helps also.
I must admit that I found the lens used (very slightly used, but still a pretty good deal). Nice affordable equipment can be found if you look for it.
Tim