Some landscape photography books and websites claim that sunset photos are amateurish and should be avoided by true Landscape Photographers as they are plain boring.
Really?
One of the most inspiring views in our planet is an spectacular sunset, or a sunrise if we are early risers. It is no surprise that we all aim up our cameras to remember and to share the view. I’ve seen simulations of Martian sunsets and they look sad and nearly colorless. I will not be a colonist there, trust me. In the Moon, with no atmosphere, they are just black!
So here I am, sharing yesterday’s sunset in my corner of our beautiful planet. I hope you will find it as pretty as it looked to me!
An ultrawide lens (anything below 24 mm in 35 mm equivalent format) can provide a sweeping view of an open landscape, but I also find it important for crowded forest and tree covered environments.
The widest rectilinear lens I own is an 11 mm lens by Irix and it is an excellent lens, but these pictures are made with other lenses. They are landscapes I made while testing an ultra wide 11 mm lens by Venus Optics on my Z7 alongside a 12 mm Samyang fisheye lens. I no longer own either lens but the photos I made that afternoon are good representatives of what can be done with these optics.
A fisheye lens allowed me to frame the pastures with he branches literally above my head. By keeping the horizon near the center of the frame, it remains straight on a fisheye lens image.
One thing I sometimes dislike about ultra wide rectilinear lenses is that elements in the corners of the image can look too stretched, like sucked into the frame. Because of this, I sometimes actually prefer using a fisheye lens: when used carefully, one can can hide the strong deformation we associate with their extreme projection. By keeping the horizon near the center of the frame, it remains straight on a fisheye lens image. In other cases, the image can be reprojected (defished as some people call it) to avoid the curved corners.
Removing just enough of the fisheye distortion can provide a convincing ultra wide image without the light falloff that plagues rectilinear ultra wide angle lenses in the corners. A photo using the rectilinear Laowa 11 mm lens works fine and takes advantage of the stretching of the lower tree branch to give depth to the composition.
You can be the judge now and decide if this approach works as I really wanted to include nearby elements from a restricted point of view: I was literally shooting from a barbed-wire fence in all the photos I show here.
Have you tried using fisheye lenses for landscape photos?
Here are two images made from about the same viewpoint using the 11 mm rectilinear lens and the 12 mm fisheye. They are clearly not identical but both are very usable. Do you like one better than the other?
As you frame the flying bird, put a focusing sensor on its eye, initiate tracking and compose your photo so there is space on the front… ‘Yeah right…. I shoot Swallows around here!’
I have been honored to have a Black and White Photography Exhibition at the prestigious Calderón Guardia Museum in Costa Rica. Opening day on February 26 drew a large crowd of nice people and here are some snapshots from that night. Continue reading My Photo Exhibition in Costa Rica!→
In my post about nesting Least Grebes I said I would be showing photos of the distant birds taken with my 300mm lens and stacked 1.4X and 2.0X teleconverters. Here is a photo of one of the parents is about to feed a piece of crayfish to the chicks. Continue reading A happy family… with stacked teleconverters→
Photographing rain forest birds is a completely different business than shooting water birds on a sunny beach where you get to easily picture birds in flight at high shutter speeds. Inside a dark forest, well… you easily reach the limits of current technology. Continue reading Rainforest Birds in Flight Photography→
In spite of its name, the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica has some days of very sunny weather which create difficult light for photography. Naturally they happen every time I happen to visit… Continue reading Sunny in the Cloud Forest→
The claims that on-sensor phase-detection autofocus sensors in Nikon’s Z7 does away with autofocus fine-tuning are wrong. I had to use AF Fine Tuning to get my lenses to focus properly. Continue reading Nikon’s Z7 requires AF-Fine Tuning→
There is a lot of talk on the Internet about the Nikon Z7 capabilities for wildlife photography, especially of birds in flight. I took out the Z7 for the kind of bird photos I normally do and I am very, very happy with the results. Continue reading Bird photography with the Nikon Z7→
A few weeks every March my parents’ garden becomes an obligate stop for passersby: a mass of rose-lavender orchid flowers that we Costa Ricans love and call Guaria Morada is the cause. Continue reading Orchids… forest or garden?→
Writings about the art and technique of photography. Mostly with Nikon and Olympus equipment.
eduardo libby: photography blog 