Friday, October 16, 2020

Andy's Angles: Leaf Peeping

 

I put this one up on social media recently, with the promise of telling the little photography tale behind it.  Well, it's really not much of a story.

I had a couple of goals the other morning-- shoot some leaves and put the standard kit lens through its paces with depth of field experiments.

The location-- the Lackawanna Heritage Valley Trail, near Broadway and the Lackawanna River in Scranton.

Serious photographers look down their noses at kit lenses, the ones that come with the camera.  I get that.  Versatile?  Yes.  Capable of producing interesting images?  Sometimes.  I wanted to play with depth of field and background blur, so I opened it up as far as it would go-- 3.5.  It's OK, but prime lesnses I carry with me can do better.  I shot on Av, and my camera seemed to over compensate for the bright sunlight by giving me a very fast shutter speed.  That means a slightly underexposed photo, and I fixed that with some post production.  It's also possible the camera overcompensated for the bright yellow leaves in the background.

It's hardly a Top Ten photo, but I do like the end result.  I'll go in to a little more detail on Sunday.