The Roving Photographer

Photo Op 4: Chicory and Pipes

What does a roving photographer do when he's traveled to take a special photograph, only to find he can't see what you were expecting? How would you make the proverbial lemonade out of this set of lemons?

Ash Piles

My wife and I traveled to Monroe, Michigan in July, 2008, to tour locations near Lake Erie where the endangered American Lotus grew.  One of these sites was property of Detroit Edison, a local utility that opened its doors to us and even served us lunch.  

Indeed, there were many Lotus growing in their waterways, but for some reason our guides chose to take us to the top of an ash pile so that we could gaze on the flowers from several hundred yards away - not what I was hoping for.

An ash pile is like a lot of trash dumps, a big hill overgrown with grass and weeds. In this case, the hill was built pumping a slurry of ash and water from the coal power plant  through large pipes over a period of years.

After a few of us realized that we weren't getting close enough to the lotus, we started looking for other subjects.  On top of this mostly barren hill, on an overcast day, I thought we'd have to look hard.

Well, not really ... a roving photographer can always find something to photograph. He just has to keep an open mind and eye.

Chicory

For example, those weeds I mentioned were wildflowers.

If I were tracking a roving photographer's life list of wildflowers, like birders do for birds, I would have ticked a new one off my list:

Chicory, the root of which you may know as a coffee substitute or additive.

Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR @ 200mm, ISO 200, 1/125s, f/16, fill flash  Using a long lens to get close to a small subject.

Ted's Digital Photography Tip Telephoto Close-ups We often think of using our long focal-length lenses to make distant objects seem closer. But, you can also use a long lens to make close objects larger - to substitute for a macro lens if you didn't bring one (or your camera doesn't have a macro mode). While you won't achieve the same level of magnification as with a macro lens (or mode), with the high resolution of today's digital photography sensors, you will still capture an amazing amount of detail. I find that it also helps to use fill flash with close-ups.  The extra light helps bring out detail.  It also allows for smaller aperture to help with depth of field, which especially helps if I am hand-holding and not able to keep a precise distance from the subject

I really wanted a close-up of this flower, and wished that I had a macro lens and a tripod with me. Or, that I had brought my other camera with a built-in macro mode.

Either way, I could have gotten really  close and captured more detail.  But, the plan for this trip was to photograph more distant subjects and I chose to travel light.

So...
on to the Roving Photographer's plan 'B':

Use the gear at hand

This was a great way to exercise the long extreme of my 18 - 200 mm lens. 

It helps that this lens has a minimum focal length of 18 inches (.5 m).  Most point-and-shoot cameras and several digital SLR zoom lenses have a similar short focusing distance. On the other hand, more expensive (and more specialized) SLR long lenses (either prime or zoom), typically do not focus as close.

Same image, magnified to show detail.

Pipes

Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR @ 200mm, ISO 640, 1/250s, f/16  A wide-angle lens adds drama contrasting the scale of foreground to background.

• The wider apparent depth of field of a wide-angle lens brings the entire middle half of the image is in sharp focus, while the near and far quarters (top and bottom) are in focus enough to look good.
  
  
• The contrast in scale from foreground to background.
  
  
• The strong directionality of the pipes.
  
  
• And, of course, the wide angle of view, which helps to give some sense of the breadth of the grass-covered ash pile off to the top and right.

• I would like to have had the bolted collar in the foreground in sharper focus.  I could have backed up a bit to do that, but I would have lost some of the impact of its size in the image.  Or, I could have stopped my lens down further than f/16.
  

• I think this photograph achieves what I was after, which was to leverage contrast in both scale and light to create a dramatic  image of a plain subject.