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| From photo project 2010 |
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| From photo project 2010 |
The Subject:
We went up by the Hudson River to hang out with some friends on Saturday, and finally got a chance to eat at a Korean restaurant in Fort Lee - where Korean food is legendary around the Northeast part of the country. After dinner, we went to a park overlooking the George Washington Bridge as sunset rolled in. Unfortunately, I had lost a lot of the sun behind the hills, and much of the golden sunset couldn't be seen from this perspective. I did manage to snap off a couple shots before we headed out of the park to Mitsuwa for ice-cream.
The Shot(s):
Mounted to a tripod, the first shot was taken with an 18-105mm lens set at 18mm, F22, and ISO at 200 with a polarizing filter. I just had the filter on because I never took it off from shooting the Rockbox the previous day so it wasn't on there for a specific purpose; although I did like how the colors are more saturated. The second shot was with a 50mm prime lens mounted with just a UV filter that I had on after trying to capture some candid portraitures. The composition had to be a little different since it wasn't a wide angle lens. Gone are the rocks in the foreground and the building to the left of the bridge. It's a much more GBW-centric shot, but to me, I lost a lot in the second shot. The first shot, while the GBW just adds to the scenery, is not really a focal point like it is in the second shot. When shooting landscape photography, I've learned two things in my short time with photography. The first is by keeping something in the foreground of your composition, like the rocks in the first shot, you give the composition more depth. The second thing I've learned is to keep your ISO low because a high ISO combined with a small aperture (F22) decreases your image sharpness and increases grain (I read that somewhere). I learned this lesson the hard way when we were up in Arcadia National Park last month on an overcast day. I foolishly turned the ISO up to around 1000 to compensate for the small aperture and a fast enough shutter speed so that I wouldn't have to mount to a tripod. Many of those shots were fairly grainy and rather unpleasant to look at. So one thing I've gotten in the habit of doing now is to lug around a tripod whenever I think I'm going to have the opportunity to shoot landscape photography.
So here are the two shots - two different compositions. Which one do you guys like better? Leave a comment!
I like the first; it's bigger. Since your shooting landscapes, how come you turned the camera on it's side? I guess it was to keep the rocks in the foreground? Otherwise, why not maximize the 18mm view and capture more of the GWB and city line...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. I experimented with both a horizontal and a vertical composure at 18mm. The horizontal composition was much less interesting. I Wasn't getting that much more of the bridge - the curved suspension part of the bridge went another 1/3 of the way back up to the right what you would've seen here. I could've panned all the way to the right to just capture the GBW, but that just wasn't the shot I was going for. If it was at night and the bridge was lit up, that may have been a different story. I also would've lost the rocks in the foreground, and I felt in a scene with so much drabby colors, I needed something darker and richer - hence the rocks on the bottom, and why I kept so much sky since the middle portion here is smog from the city, and it wasn't until you look higher up in the sky that it actually turned back to blue. The rocks on the bottom combined with the movement of the water towards you gives the photo a bit more three dimensionality too. Hence why I chose to post this shot versus the horizontal shot.
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