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06/14/2006 02:26:58 AM · #1 |
Hiya,
I've just got back to Singapore after two months travelling around New Zealand. What a beautiful country. One of the most awesome aspects of New Zealand are the geographically sheer mountains rising to great heights in a relatively compact area. They are magnificent.
So, my question to you guys - how do you best shoot sheer mountains such as these to best convey their majesty. I was armed with my new, bought-for-the-trip, Canon EF-S 10-20mm lens that I thought would do the trick. I quickly learnt though that while this lens allowed me to frame the whole mountains (even when hiking amongst them) it had the impact of flattening them. That's the spread out perspective. At 10mm sheer 300m cliffs look like 20m slopes. On the other hand when I used my telezoom (not a great piece of glass) I found it extremely difficult to frame the full mountain (I was after all hiking amongst them and the are very compact). At 300mm even the smallest cliff can be made to look impressive, but it is not a fair reflection of the whole environment.
Short of flying way above the mountains or finding a good vantage point far away and using a top-class tele lens how can a photographer do justice to these mountains? Any ideas?
Personally I found the shots with the range stretching away from me (or ridges stretching away from me) with the wide-angle worked best. And I got some great shots that I'll post when I've finished processing everything taken on the trip. Still, I can't help feeling I didn't manage to do the mountains justice.
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06/14/2006 02:34:24 AM · #2 |
| I would go with panoramas. I know it is not possible all the time, but that would be the only way to avoid distortions and capture the entire scene. Wide-angles do introduce distortions. |
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06/15/2006 09:06:47 PM · #3 |
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06/15/2006 09:24:33 PM · #4 |
| Grand landscapes are always hard to capture - a good technique is to try and focus on a small feature, say a clif instead of the whole mountain, but give it some scale by putting something like a person in the foreground. Simple but can be effective if done well. |
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06/15/2006 10:10:33 PM · #5 |
Read John Fielders book on the subject. He explains in depth ways to capture the scape, and that you really have to be selective in what you capture becasue the camera can never see as much as the eye. He outlines some ways to make your landscapes come alive.
The Art Of Seeing |
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06/16/2006 12:41:42 AM · #6 |
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06/16/2006 01:13:00 AM · #7 |
i will be very interested when you post your pics of NZ because I just bought the same lens and am shortly going to be traveling around NZ for pics also.!!
nick |
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06/16/2006 02:16:20 AM · #8 |
I get frustrated a lot trying to do that with landscapes and also with large buildings/palaces. If you want to capture the entire thing and be able to get some pretty good resolution from it shooting multiple frames and then stitching them later is for sure the way to go. You just have to be careful to get the sky pretty evenly exposed to make the stitching a little easier.
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