Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Photography

Human Effort
I have been considering what makes “art”. I have only gotten as far as believing a necessary ingredient – maybe the only one – is human effort.
Random beauty
The world is a riot of random beauty. Flowers, trees, waterfalls, mountain ranges, oceans, sunsets abound. When you think about them, most of them are exceptionally beautiful in their way.
I am blessed to live in Colorado. We have all of those things above (except oceans) and more. It is fall here as I write this. The last two weekends I have been out for long drives within a few hours of my home. The fall aspen colors are great. I’ve seen waterfalls and mountains and interesting trees and even burn areas – yes, they can have a kind of beauty of their own. It is a new moon time and I have been blown away by the beauty of the night sky in dark areas of the mountains. I’m not bragging. Most of you probably live in a beautiful area if you learn to appreciate it.
Beauty like this and grand landscapes are some of the first things that come to mind for most of us when we think about going out to take pictures. How can we not take great pictures when we are surrounded by natural beauty? Well, that’s where the difference happens that changes it from a pretty picture to art.
Blank canvas
Let’s look the other direction and imagine our self a painter. We have a blank canvas in front of us. What will we put on it?
This makes it a little easier to think about creativity and art. One of the unique things about photography is that the sensor records whatever we have framed in our viewfinder. One of our challenges is to very selectively limit what we want to see. Painters must design their composition and add every element, color, and brush stroke manually. A very different skill set, but still, as I will argue, the same kind of art.
So everything that ends up on the canvas had to be consciously placed there by the artist. What the painter creates is undeniably a work of human effort.
Interpretation
Have you experienced a time when two photographers have been together at a location, but you each got very different results? How can that be? You saw the same scene in front of you but made something different out of it.
Actually, that is not only common, it is typical. It is a difference between art and reporting.
When a newspaper journalist (there are still a few of them) sees a scene or event, if they are an honest reporter, their goal is to accurately report it to their readers. They want to capture the essential information without bias, while keeping it interesting. Whether in words or still images or videos, they want their audience to have an detailed first hand account of it.
But let’s say another crew of filmmakers was there at the same time. They have no implied imperative to be factual. Their focus may be on the drama of the scene, or it’s visual impact, or how it affects people, or even how it supports their particular political bias. Is this group doing a bad job?
No. Not if they are clearly interpreting events from a subjective viewpoint. What they bring back will probably be vastly different from the newspaper reporter. It may even be difficult to believe it was the same event. By taking a loose interpretation of facts, they had more freedom to create art.
When you are out photographing, are you reporting or making art?
Two photographers
Let’s get back to those 2 photographers at the same scene. It could be that one takes a very conventional, factual approach. Implicitly he believes this landscape shot should encompass his field of vision and it should show “just what he saw”. No more. No less. The result could well be a beautiful photo that many people would love to hang on their wall.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
But let’s say the other photographer takes a very different approach. Let’s say for him, a wide shot of the whole scene is not how he relates to the spirit of the place. Instead, he zooms in on a small part of the scene. Say a small cascade with fallen leaves on it. By getting low and close and using a slow shutter speed and a polarizer, he gets the motion of blurred water among the rocks with reflections of the seasonal colors. Not something you could look at and definitely know the location. But the viewer gets a feel for the place and time as expressed by the photographer.
Which is better? I can’t say. Maybe neither. Depends on their skill and vision. But one is more likely to be art.
Created
Now we come around full circle to my statement about human effort. One photograph is exactly what you would have seen if you drove to the same overlook. Some skill was required to successfully capture the image, but you know almost nothing of what the photographer was feeling about the scene.
The second image demonstrates effort by the artist to create a scene for us to see. By scanning, evaluating, focusing in, moving, they bring us to a new point of view. This photographer is trying to create something beyond a straight image anyone would have seen and taken. It has (potentially) elevated the dialog and given us a new insight. I say potentially, because it may be a failure. Still, he tried.
I am showing my biases. For me, at this point in my journey, the more interesting images are the result of effort to understand and interpret my feelings. It is not totally black & white, just a statistical prediction.
Human effort
These feelings about human effort are not just my own conclusions. Are there any original thoughts left to think?
W. Eugene Smith, for instance, said
“I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.”
Guy Tal pointed out in his great book The Interior Landscape that
“Poetry” derives from a Greek word meaning “to create” or to bring something into being. “Art” derives from a Latin word referring also to items brought into being by human skill (as opposed to things occurring naturally or randomly).
So “art” and “poetry” basically mean the same thing, just from 2 different languages. Art is an act of creation that comes as a deliberate use of human skill. We bring something into being. Our art may be, as Smith said, at odds with the literal facts. I like that phrase.
Is it art?
Ah, the existential question behind all this. What is “art”? At this point, I have to come down on the side of a definite “I don’t know.” I have heard it said that “anything created as art is art.” I’m at a loss to do much better than that. I say that because I look at a fair bit of “art” and for a lot of it, I have to just scratch my head and think “Really? What were they thinking?”. So I obviously do not understand. Maybe I can’t understand.
But for this little subset of the universe I am writing about today, maybe we can make some judgments.
So, is photography art? Yes. It absolutely can be. If it is created as art, it is art. It requires artistic sensibilities to do a good job. I’m not talking about selfies.
Is a representational photo less “good” than an interpretive one? I can’t say. It varies with time and context. You do what you have to do. Make your own art and follow your own values.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
I used to be a straight representational photographer. I did everything I could to capture a scene exactly and in detail. Just like it was. Over time I have morphed into someone who values interpretation more. Even trending into abstraction and occasionally surreal. For the most part, if I show you something, I want it to be interesting and fresh. Perhaps that is a natural progression with maturity, like tending to prefer drier wine as your taste gets more sophisticated. I don’t know.
Sorry to disappoint you. At this point I can only suggest you do your art and I will do mine and let’s not judge each other. If we are both happy with what we are doing, what else matters? And that is part of the beauty of it all. I used to be an engineer. One thing I appreciate as an artist is the much higher level of ambiguity. That is also a sign of maturity.
November 6, 2024
Out of Focus
A few months ago I wrote about being in focus, both technically and mentally. I want to go a little deeper into how technical focus happens in modern cameras and an an experience I had recently where what I did was out of focus.
What is focus
Technically, focus is simple when the lens is adjusted so that the part of the subject you are most interested in is sharply defined. Your lens has a focus ring to use to manually focus. Most of us probably use the camera’s built in auto focus capability. This is much more precise than my old eyes. And a lot faster than most of us can do manually.
Focusing physically moves one or more of the lens elements inside the lens barrel. This is required to adjust the focus point.
I will let you argue whether focus is an absolute, precise point or just an acceptable range. I will just say that I am swinging away from being adamant about absolute technical perfection and leaning more toward artistic judgement and intent. Set your own values you will live by.
Whether we manual focus or use auto focus, we observe in the viewfinder the image moving from a fuzzy blob a crisp, detailed representation of the scene before us. Unless we have a very old piece of technology in our camera with something called a split image viewfinder. I had this in my first SLR. It was magic and awesome for most of the subjects I shot.
The split image viewfinder showed the image sharp regardless of focus. The image was divided into 2 pieces in the central circle. The pieces were offset from each other when out of focus. Use the focus ring to bring the 2 halves into alignment and the image was sharply focused. Magic. Enough trivia, though.
Little did I know this was a type of and precursor to what we now call phase detection auto focus. Let’s get a little deeper into the technology.
How does it work?
Auto focus in a DSLR or mirrorless camera is complex and requires many precise components. But it works so well now that we tend to take it for granted.
There are 2 basic technologies in modern cameras. The older one is called contrast detection and the newer and better one is called phase detection.
I have written on histograms, a subject I consider vitally important to photography. Histograms and their interpretation are the basis of contrast detection auto focus. It is brilliantly simple in concept and in process as what we do when we are manually focusing.
If an image in the viewfinder is out of focus, the pixels are blurred together. Kind of like looking through a fog. A result is that in the histogram, the values are clustered in the center. This is an indication of low contrast. But when an image is sharp, there is a wider range of brighter and darker pixels. This illustrates it:
From https://digital-photography.com/camera/autofocus-how-it-works.php
Focus process
So conceptually, the system moves the focus a little and measures again to see if the histogram got more narrow (more out of focus) or wider (sharper) . If it got more in focus, continue moving that direction and measuring until the peak contrast if found, But if it got more out of focus, move the focus the other direction and continue the process. It is a hunting process to find the optimum focus point. Just like we do to manually focus.
Unfortunately, this process is slow. It can take seconds to arrive at the focus. This is why phase detection auto focus came to prominence.
In phase detection auto focus, some of the light coming through the lens is split off to a separate sensor. Like the split image viewfinder I mentioned above, it is further split into two paths. Through some brilliant engineering, they can determine in one measurement how far off focus is and in what direction. The focus moves there quickly. Note that in mirrorless cameras all the light goes directly to the sensor, so these auto focus sensors are built directly into the sensor.
I said that phase detection is “better” than contrast detection. That is true as far as being very fast. Actually, contrast detection can achieve more precise focus. There is a kind of system called hybrid the combines the strengths of both. I will not discuss that or go into the bewildering variety of focus areas or focus modes.
Out of focus
This is all great as far as technology goes. It works quite well in the cases it is designed for. We are lucky to have it.
But all of these systems rely on the sensor having enough light to see some contrast. It doesn’t work in the dark. Yes, there is another variation on auto focus that is called active auto focus. It shoots a red beam from the camera to illuminate the focus area. This has a very short range and does not help the scenario I’m about to describe.
Recently I was in Rocky Mountain National Park, over on the west slope where there is little light. It was full dark on a moonless night. The mountains all around provided lovely silhouettes. The stars were astonishing. Beautiful. I had to stop and get some star images.
A trailhead parking lot provided a great and convenient place to set up – wondering if those occasional sounds I heard in the dark were bears. I guess not. It was perfect. Except. There was not enough contrast to focus, even at 6400 ISO. And the viewfinder image was too noisy to be useful for manual focus. I did not have a powerful enough flashlight to cast enough light on the nearest object, over 100 yards away, to allow the focus system to work.
Adding to the problem, the lens I brought on this outing did not have a focus scale (a curse of modern zoom lens design). Normally, in low light, I switch to manual focus and set the lens to infinity for a scene like this. I guessed, but missed badly for a big section of the images. They were uselessly out of focus. I am ashamed to show an example, but like this:
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Experience is a great teacher
I write frequently advocating that we study our technology to become expert with it. And to practice, practice, practice to know how to use our gear, even in the dark. I failed. I encountered too much dark and a lens I had never tried to use in low light. The combination tripped me up. I am ashamed to admit I did not follow my own advice well enough.
But every failure is a learning opportunity, right? It can be a great motivator and reinforcer. I did some research and discovered a “hidden feature” I never knew my camera had. It should save me the next time I do this.
My Nikon camera has a setting I had never paid any attention to called “Save focus position”. When On (the default) it remembers the focus position of the current lens when the camera is turned off and restores it on wake up. But when Off – this is the brilliant part – it sets the lens to infinity on wake up. Now I will have a known infinity focus setting, even in total darkness! This setting is now in my menu shortcuts so I can access it quickly.
I would never have learned about this feature if I had not failed so spectacularly. Experience really is a great teacher.
So dig into those obscure settings you never bother with. There sometimes is gold there.
Keep learning and failing!
The featured image
That night’s shooting was not all bad. I nailed the focus on this star shot. It was purely of the stars and had no foreground. This foreground has been substituted from another blurry image that night (actually, redrawn by hand).
This is artistic expression rather than literal reality. I do that a lot. As photography progresses and matures, I believe that is more and more the norm.
October 30, 2024
It Looks Like a Painting
This comment used to make me angry. But I have now rationalized that most people mean it as a compliment. If it looks like a painting then it must be art.
Is painting the standard?
For most people, painting means art. It is what they were taught. Photographs are those low value things they do on their phone. They’re mostly for memories and bragging rights on social media.
I believe most people view painting as “high art”. Like they might view classical music. After all, both are remote and fairly difficult to understand. Removed from their daily lives. High art is something they have been taught that they should value, but they seldom partake of it.
And paintings are viewed as difficult, labor intensive works requiring lots of training and “suffering”. That instills them with high value in many people’s estimation. It is not unusual for painters to encourage an aura of this being something so great and high that we cannot understand it. We viewers are lucky the artist will share a glimpse of such truth with us.
And on a practical note, a painting is one of a kind. The artist paints one original. This increases the value of the work in some markets.
Some people, looking at one of my images, describe it as “painterly”. To them, this is a compliment. Even photo reviewers occasionally use the term. Internally, I usually cringe, unless it was actually my goal to look like a painting.
So for my peace of mind I have decided to accept “it looks like a painting” as a sincere compliment. It may be alien to my goals and values as a photographer, but is probably the best way a lot of people know of to say “it is art”.
What does a painting look like?
I will consider that a “painting” is some type of color medium applied to a substrate like paper or canvas by hand. I will stretch the definition to include pouring or throwing paint. Typical color mediums are oil, acrylic, watercolor, or pastel.
The “by hand” seems to be important. Until print reproductions are made, all paintings are originals. Many people consider a “mechanically created” print inferior to a painting because it was too easy to make.
Brushes are most often used to apply the color. Although they come in a wide range of sizes, and it is possible to create very detailed paintings, generally paintings are a somewhat coarse expression of a scene. That expression is considered part of the artistry.
This is what people think of as a painting. It is an Albert Bierstadt painting titled “Rocky Mountain Landscape”. As someone who lives in the Rockies, I can attest this is purely fictional:
From the White House Collection. Image from Google Art Project
An artist typically paints a scene they can observe (or make up). This means the scene is fairly static. Unless, of course, they take a picture of it and paint from a photographic print. Is that allowed? Does that make the painting something else? 🙂
So paintings are generally relatively large, static scenes, less detailed than a photograph, and created by hand.
Do I want my image to look like a painting?
Do I want my image to look like a painting? Great question. Sometimes yes. Usually no.
This is a fairly typical image I do that screams PHOTORGRAPH. It could be painted, but then that would be a painter trying to make his work look like a photograph. 🙂
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Why would I want an image to look like a painting? I do occasionally enjoy creating abstract images. Sometimes they work best done as a dreamy, blurry, hand drawn look. I love that photography can achieve a wide variety of effects. I enjoy pushing the boundary and creating an unexpected look.
But in these cases, I have chosen to create the image with this look. My goal was not to “make it look like a painting”. Sometimes an image tells me what it wants to look like. Sometimes what it wants to look like is what most people consider “painterly”. If that is what is right for the image, then OK.
Don’t feel inferior
I think photography is an amazing art form. Its versatility is unsurpassed. Being technology based allows it to operate somewhat outside the limits of the artist’s mind. We can explore time and scale and space and even non-visual realms in ways that other artistic mediums can only copy.
With photography, we can make one print and stop or we can make 1000 prints. We can re-scale a file to make a print very small to fit into a locket or up to wall-sized for a gallery or to decorate a large room. Or even billboards or the sides of buildings.
Never let the intelligentsia convince you you are somehow inferior to painters or other “real” arts. They are just trying to protect their self interests. Photography is as real as any art. Be proud of your art.
So when someone tells you your image looks like a painting, be gracious. Don’t launch into a lecture about why they are wrong and how they do not understand. This would be rude and even insulting. Accept it as a compliment. They are using terms they know to tell you they like your work and consider it good art. Be happy. But also be confident that it does not have to look like a painting to be great art.
Today’s featured image
The image at the top would be considered “painterly” by many people. Did I want it to look like a painting? No. I was exploring possibilities of long shutter speeds with flowing water and reflections in a river. I knew from experience that I could often get abstract results I like. This is an example.
I like it. It is abstract, and it flows and has a lot of subtle details of interest. Does it look like a painting? That is for you to decide. If you think that, great. But it is not a label I try for when I am creating. I would not market my work as “looks like a painting”.
October 16, 2024
What You Find
This is heresy, but I recommend most of the time we work with what we find rather than planning extensively and expecting everything to be “perfect”.
Planning
It is common these days for photographers to research locations is detail before ever going into the field. And there are lots of tools to help us do it.
For any given location we can find what time of the year is “optimum”, what time of day is best, even where to stand for the best view. We can research the weather we should be able to expect, the temperature, exactly when sunrise or sunset is if that is important to the shot.
Then, of course, we can work back to where to stay, what time to get up, where the beat eating places are, etc.
Basically, then, we can just show up at the right time, set up and take the shot we want, and leave.
Trophies
A well planned shot like that can lead to some excellent pictures. If you are a National Geographic photographer out on a 6 month assignment to get a certain picture, that is a great approach.
I have 2 problems with it
1. It is collecting trophies.
2. What about the experience?
Much of photography these days seems to revolve around collecting trophies. We have to get that signature picture of Half Dome or the Eiffel Tower to post on social media to impress our peers.
That’s not me. I usually avoid places where dozens of other photographers are lined up shoulder to shoulder, fighting for tripod placements. Those sights are well covered. I do not plan to contribute yet another photo of Half Dome to the world, unless I am able to capture something unique. That is less and less likely when millions of shots are taken of it every year by good photographers.
I fully realize this is a personal value. It also is rooted in my personality type. I derive satisfaction from creating fresh, creative images that represent my vision. Whether or not anyone else likes them. Some other people need to bag trophies. Checking off the bucket list items is more important than actually having the image.
It would be foolish for me to criticize them. We are different. I do not agree with them, but I recognize that this behavior is true for many people. You have to do what is right for you.
What you find
Taking a good photograph is an emotional encounter for me. Talking about the experience you get is subtle and harder to describe. It is intensely personal.
If you are the meticulous planner I described earlier and you show up at your target location, what happens if things go wrong? What if the weather is too stormy to get out? Perhaps there are forest fires around and it is closed or obscured by smoke. Maybe a road is slowed down by construction and you get to the location “too late” for the planned shot.
If things like this happen and you can’t get the shot you planned, is it a failure? Are you disappointed with the outing? Was it a wasted trip?
I’m not usually so disappointed. I am there to see, feel, internalize – and, oh by the way, make images I am proud of. A sunny day may not inherently be better than a rainy day. Why is a snow storm worse than a warm summer day? It all depends on my reaction and attitude and what I am able to do with what I find.
How good are you?
I believe the attitude of accepting what we find and using our skill to work with it is healthy and mature. We cannot control what we will encounter. But we can control our attitude.
So whether I am at the Eiffel Tower or in my neighborhood, I try to make excellent images in whatever conditions I find. OK, allow 2 seconds feeling sorry for yourself, then put it out of your mind, enjoy yourself, and attack the photo problem.
For example, recently I went out locally to shoot some pictures of trees. A favorite subject of mine. But it turned into an extremely windy day. Did that make it a waste? No. Have you ever tried to shoot pictures of the wind? It was challenging and interesting after I reframed the problem. I enjoyed it and I like some of the images.
Making good pictures in unexpected conditions is a test of our craft and our character. Loosen your rigid expectations. Roll with the punches. Make lemonade out of lemons. Insert your own cliche.
But cliche or not, try it. Be flexible. It surprises me that unexpected pictures in bad conditions are sometimes the most memorable to me.
Today’s image
This wasn’t taken on the windy day I described. But it was a much worse day. It was in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, CO. It is not the conditions I came for, but it was what I found. HIgh wind funneling through the rock formations, blowing snow starting to pile up, bitter cold in Colorado in the winter. Sounds like a great day to be out.
Actually, after I kicked myself out into it and started seeing images, it was great. It turned out to be a very enjoyable experience. I went crazy shooting, when I could keep the snow cleared off my lens. Of course, it took a while later for my hands to thaw out and I was soaking wet and shivering. But I did not notice that very much at the time. All in all, I look back on it as a good time. And I like the image.
September 25, 2024
$Diffraction$
Diffraction
Today I would like to try to help us understand a little about what diffraction is. Not getting too deep in the theory. Just enough to demystify it a bit.
Scary
Diffraction is probably a scary word to most of us. Even if we don’t know what it really means, we have heard of it and have been taught that it is a “bad thing”.
Have you been taught to avoid using apertures smaller than f/11? Note that when I say a “small” aperture I am referring to the physical size. Remember that as the aperture numbers get bigger the actual opening in the lens gets smaller. This simple graphic illustrates that:
The lore is that very small apertures (large f-numbers, like f/22) make an image too blurry to be useful. Don’t believe everything you hear without testing it.
Light theory
I’m going very light on theory (yes, pun intended). We’re just going to graze the surface without taking a deep dive in. (Here is a source to start at if you want to go deeper. Abandon all hope ye who enter…)
Light behaves as waves (most of the time). Actually, a number of things are waves: light, water waves, sound waves, gravity waves. Quantum mechanics theorizes that even matter is waves. Too deep for me.
We tend to visualize light going through our lens as rays. That is, straight lines. Yes and no. That is one useful model of looking at it. But light also behaves as waves. An interesting and important property of waves is that every point on a wave is a wave. So if the wave is blocked by a small opening, the wave spreads on the other side of the opening.
This picture by Verbcatcher does a marvelous job of illustrating that for waves in water:
$Diffraction in water waves$
See how the waves spread after going through the small opening to the sea? The smaller the opening (aperture) the more pronounced the effect. That is, a small aperture opening causes waves to spread out more.
What does it really mean
This is the basis of the recommendation to use physically large apertures (small f-numbers). Apertures that are large relative to the wavelengths of light do not cause much “bend” of the waves. Small apertures (large f-numbers) “bend” the light more.
What we can actually see in practice is that using small apertures causes our images to have a mildly “fuzzy” look. Because the waves spread more after going through a small aperture, the individual waves cover a larger pixel area. This slight spreading of the light causes the image to appear less sharp.
The best discussion of diffraction for photographers I have found is from this article by Spencer Cox. But even this gets too deep into theory.
I borrowed this image from it to illustrate the practical effects of diffraction as we change aperture:
$Effects of diffraction with aperture$
See how the larger apertures (small f-numbers) are sharper than the smaller ones?
This illustration below, also from Spencer Cox) gives a great conceptual representation of what is happening. Take that the grid represents pixels in your sensor. At f/4, the point of light only strikes one pixel. It will be seen as very sharp. But at small apertures, the waves spread some onto adjacent pixels and create a kind of fog.
Should you fear it?
Should you fear it and always shun small apertures? No, it is just a reality of physics. It is no more to be feared than gravity. As one of my sons would say, it is what it is. Be aware of what is going to happen and consciously decide how far you need to go.
All of the exposure determinations we make daily are tradeoffs. How much to stop motion? How much depth of field do we need? Is there enough light for a good exposure? What ISO setting should I use? All of these things and more have to be balanced in the moment of shooting, besides composition and esthetic issues.
Each setting costs something. As experienced photographers we must understand the tradeoffs and be able to judge what is right for us at the moment.
Diffraction is one of those tradeoffs. Know what it is going to do and how to use it or avoid it.
Sometimes you need more
But why would we ever intentionally make our image less sharp? We seldom actually choose to make it less sharp, but sometimes we need other things. I can give 2 easy examples.
The first and most common one is to increase depth of field (DOF). It is counter intuitive, but making the aperture smaller increases the perceived depth of field. So on the one hand we are making the image less sharp, but on the other hand we are making it appear sharper throughout. When we need to make a certain range of the field of view acceptably sharp we stop down the aperture until we achieve our goal. A tradeoff.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
The second case that comes to mind is to reduce the shutter speed. I often intentionally shoot motion blur. But I usually forget to bring a neutral density filter for the lens I am using at the time. I can generally achieve the effect I want by using my polarizer, reducing the ISO to the lowest setting, and cranking the aperture down to the smallest possible one. This will probably give me a shutter speed in the range I want to use. Yes, the small aperture increases diffraction and makes the image less sharp. But it is handheld at a long shutter speed. It is already intentionally blurred.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
But maybe more importantly, in a great video on Lumminous Landscape, Charles Cramer said “sharpness is something we have to get over.” He explained that if we take a picture just because it is sharp, it probably won’t be very interesting. We have to forget about how sharp is it and instead react to the scene before us on an emotional level.
Shoot the picture
Diffraction is a side effect of physics and our photographic technology. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t blindly follow some rule you learned in the past about what you can or can’t do. Understand enough about it to recognize it and know how to use it to your advantage.
Look at the image above of the woman’s face. Even at f/32 – an extreme case – it is acceptable. Extra sharpening can be applied in your editing tool to compensate for it.
So diffraction is just there. Allow it to happen if that is the tradeoff you need to make. Just like using a high ISO adds noise, that is acceptable most of the time and better than missing the shot.
I know many of us don’t want to deal with what we perceive as increased complexity or too much technical detail. We just want to go take great pictures. My hope is that topics like this will actually make your photography life simpler by providing some grounding for information you may have heard in the past. Rather than trying to remember rules for how to use your equipment, you now have a model for what diffraction is doing and how strong its effect is. I hope you will be able to stop fearing it and accept it is just part of the tradeoffs of the technology.
Today’s image
This is a great old WWII era truck I found in my town. It is a Coleman. This was actually a Colorado company. It was designed and manufactured in the Denver area.
I needed enough depth of field to span from the great rust and paint patterns on the near outside through most of the cab. So it is shot at f/22. Diffraction? Works for me.
What do you think?
September 18, 2024