Photo of the Week 127 & 128 – Big Summer Skies

I’ve been on a bit of a break from Photography – a combination of injury and crap-tacular weather, so I have yet another catch-up post to do! As always when I do multiple posts, the two images are related, in this case, very related, being two different treatments of the same RAW image. This shot was taken on the same day as the last monochrome-colour combo I posted (Photo of the Week 111 & 112 – Summer in Rathcoffey), and from a spot only a few hundred feet from where that last shot was taken.

Yesterday I posted some of my thoughts on Photographic composition, and used that post as the basis for a conversation with Allison on episode 271 of the Nosillacast podcast. In that discussion we talked about the importance of getting layers into photographs of places to give a sense of depth, and in particular we talked about the importance of the foreground layer. As part of that discussion I drew attention to the fact that there are a huge amount of possible foregrounds for every background. You can usually move hundreds of feet without making much, if any, change to the background when you’ve shooting landscapes. This gives you a wide menu of foregrounds to choose from.

If you compare and contrast these photos with those from my Photo of the Week 111 & 112 post, you’ll get a good example of just how different a shot you can get by just changing the foreground. Both sets of photos have Rathcoffey Castle as the background, both have the field of flowering Rape Seed flowers as the mid-ground, and both have the same dramatic sky at the top of the frame, but both have very different foregrounds, framings, and compositions, resulting very different photographs.

These shots have a far simpler composition, with far fewer elements in the frame. It really is just the field, the castle, and the sky. The previous shot was about showing the many interesting things around the edges of the field, the beautiful old tree, the ancient Ring Fort, and of course the castle, so it was composed in such a way as to show all these things without cluttering the frame. The filed and the sky were in that shot too, but they were almost incidental. Here, we have much less in the frame, so both the sky and the big sweeping field are the stars of the show, with the castle adding some nice interest to the background, but not being the star of the show.

These two sets of shots were taken very close to each other. The first a little to the left of the Ring Fort, with the Ring Fort included, the other a little to the right of the Ring Fort with it excluded. The Ring Fort is literally just a few pixels off to the right of this shot, but because you don’t see it, you assume it’s not there, and that the field goes on for ever. As it happens it really is a very big field, but doesn’t come across half as well in the shot if you include it’s edges.

As with the previous photos, this pair was generated using the workflow I described on the Typical Shutterbug Podcast.

on Flickr – Full-Size

Camera: Nikon D40

Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)

Exposure: 1/1250 sec

Focal Length: 18mm

Focal Ratio: f/8

ISO: 200

Camera Mode: Aperture Priority

Processing: single RAW image first tonemapped with Photomatix Pro, then tweaked with the Topaz Adjust 4 plugin in Photoshop Elements

on Flickr – Full-Size

Camera: Nikon D40

Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)

Exposure: 1/1250 sec

Focal Length: 18mm

Focal Ratio: f/8

ISO: 200

Camera Mode: Aperture Priority

Processing: single RAW image first tonemapped with Photomatix Pro, then tweaked with the Topaz Adjust 4 plugin in Photoshop Elements, and finally converted to monochrome using the Channel Mixer in Apeture