Spring Marsh — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
I made my way to Cedar Run Dock Road Sunday evening. While I wasn’t greeted with the exact sunset I was hoping for, I was welcomed with surefire signs of Spring. Ospreys perched on their platform; various seabirds I cannot identify—an ornithologist I am not—plucking out easy meals in the friendly confines of harbored tide pools; and sparks of green signaling the sedge grass’ return to life. A sight for sore eyes all after months enduring the Great Browning. From here on out conditions on the marsh should only get better. The sedge will grow and thrive, providing ample cover for productive marsh habitat simultaneously becoming more picturesque. Before long tall waving grasses colored in deep rich greens will fill our foreground and middle ground. Good times.
Friday evening I hitched a ride with Jon Carr and we made our way to Great Bay Boulevard. The hope was twofold: 1) outside shot at a well timed break in the clouds for sunset ignition; and 2) with a segment of thunderstorms approaching from the west, lightning captures were on the table. While neither outcome panned out in the ideal the night wasn’t a total wash. Under the gun of days of stiff west by northwest winds, a blowout tide exposed a land bridge and thereby allowed me to shoot from a sand plain that’s far more often than not under the cover of brackish water. Advantage: Greg. This afforded me a rare angle on Great Bay Boulevard’s first bridge, and I did my best to exploit the opportunity.
Surely I wanted some high drama cloud to ground lightning from this vantage point, but considering we were about 20 miles south of the real action that simply wasn’t in the cards. Instead I tried to make the most of the cloud level flashes coupled with the low cloud deck that was bouncing the light pollution in a cool array of orange, pink, and purple hues. One of the reasons I added a 35mm lens to my bag was for some better lightning photography. More often than not the 14mm is just too wide, and unless you have the fortitude to let the lightning get right over your head the bolts are oft too far in the distance. My hope is the 35mm while bring in the right amount of intimacy while remaining wide enough to still capture a good piece of the sky.
This shot? Again? Really? If you’re thinking we’ve been here before you’re certainly right. In an effort to get comfortable shooting landscapes at a 35mm focal length, last night I returned—if not in triumph, then in repetition—to the familiar stomping grounds of Antoinetta’s Restaurant. The logic was twofold: 1) I was short on time leaving Dock Road as one of few sunset options, and 2) if you’re testing out the landscape prowess of a new lens it’s probably best to benchmark from a location and frame you’ve successfully photographed before. Having made some winners from this spot in the past, it made as much good sense as any.
Having made my first set of brackets fixed atop a tripod using manual focus, my initial thoughts of the 35mm wide angle in comparison to its 14mm ultra wide angle focal length counterpart are as follows: (For referenced I’ve included a similarly framed shot of Antoinetta’s photographed at 14mm below.)
Staring down the 35mm makes you appreciate just how remarkably wide a 14mm focal length is—I’m roughly in the same spot as in the 14mm rendition below, yet you get the sense I’m substantially closer in the photo above. It’s a significantly tighter frame.
With a tighter focal length, though still technically wide angle, the 35mm creates less distortion in the perspective. You’ll notice the restaurant (pictured top right) has straighter, less angled lines—particularly obvious along the roof. The perspective moving the eye toward the vanishing point is far less extreme than at 14mm.
For a first pass the color and sharpness seem pretty good. At this point I am fully confident with dialing in manual focus on my 14mm. To such a degree I don’t even check to ensure I’m dialed in. I simply need to look at the position of the focus ring. It’s going to take some time with the 35mm, but through early testing the 35mm is proving plenty sharp.
Roughly three weeks in, and I am satisfied with my latest gear acquisition thus far. Still a work in progress and despite being another prime lens, the 35mm focal length is proving its versatility.
Putting in Work — 35mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/100
Test work with the 35mm continues. Yes, obvious work in progress is obvious, but the fact I took this photograph within moments of yesterday’s dreamy grass shot speaks to the versatility in this lens. To go from shallow depth of field work—getting close enough to near macro conditions—out to a serviceable landscape lens without any change in focal length. Simply stop down to ensure maximum sharpness through your acceptable area of focus, and you are golden.
In the photo above I stuck with a handheld, autofocus approach. I’ve yet to get this thing on the tripod where I’ll attempt to manually find the hyperfocal sweet spot for this lens and make multiple bracketed exposures. Once I figure that all out, I’ll be using this lens setup the same as when shooting landscapes on the 14mm. The big difference here will be a tighter image thanks to the extra focal length. For a theater of the mind comparison, look to the shot above—were I going with my 14mm rig the tree line would be pushed far back to the horizon leaving the trees still recognizable, though hardly discernible—they’d maybe be 1/3 as tall. Sure I would have been able to bring more sky and clouds into the frame, it just would have been at the expense of intimacy. With no interesting foreground subject, shooting ultra wide can get a bit boring. Of course not always, but in general.
Back to the subject at had. Considering this was a single shot, handheld, with no mirror lock while using autofocus, I am satisfied with the sharpness over all. Perfect? Hardly. Yet with some more time in the field putting in work with this lens system on my tripod mount, and I am confident the 35mm will become a key piece to my landscape arsenal.
Run Out the Tide — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Friday evening, about 20 minutes before I made this, some primetime golden hour light was pouring over the salt marsh along Great Bay Boulevard. Better yet, the clouds were decent with the tide dead low and dead calm. All signs point to decent photo making when these conditions are met.
Compositionally my goal was to key off the remnant bulkheads—the roughly 1 foot in diameter stumps of wood you see aligned at an angle about the foreground—while conveying the extent of the dead low tide. To do this I kept my tripod higher than usual, putting the camera body about 5 feet off the ground, giving me enough angle on the marsh. More often than not I tend to get low and close when shooting wide angle—this makes closer objects appear more dramatic (re: large), but limits your ability to push the viewers eye depth further out toward the horizon. In other words, if I was crunched down here as usual, the tidal exposed marsh and the still water to its right would appear as much thinner strips. However, the bulkheads would be given much more visual weight. These are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you approach a scene. What am I trying to convey? And then, perhaps more importantly, what concessions do I have to make to achieve said conveyance? This is where I cannot advocate trail and error experimentation enough in an era of digital.
But it’s not all faeries and roses here. Due to the extreme angle I placed the sun—setting it to the outer sixth of the frame—chromatic aberration and lens flare marks the horizon from right to left in several spots. While I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing, I’m fairly certain it’s not a good thing. Ultimately I will leave this up to the subjectivity of the viewer. At the very least I should concede this effect was not intentional.
Here it is—my first photograph with the new 35mm lens. Finally. Despite having this bad boy for a week now, up until tonight I had yet been able to piece together a serviceable shot. Sure there’ve been a few passable photographs, but nothing of real interest or note. This isn’t entirely unexpected: 1) I’ve never shot at a 35mm focal length before; and 2) there’s always a learning curve with a new lens. Where are its sweet spots? How sharp is it wide open? What kind of bokeh and depth of field are we dealing with? How shallow is the area of focus and how does it change throughout all f-stops? How fast? How does it focus in low light? In hyperfocal how close to my foreground subject can I get while keeping it and the horizon in acceptable focus? And so it goes. While this learning curve can feel tedious and restrictive at times, it’s a necessary period in trial and error as you learn the limits and capabilities of your lens. So here’s to a spring and summer of experimentation, and a few expletives.
Through limited period of field time so far, my primary observations orbit damn this thing is heavy, and holy smokes, this thing is sharp wide open! The latter has me excited, and the former I don’t mind—I actually prefer a heavier rig, I have strong, sizable hands and prefer the heft; though I suspect I may be in the minority here. However, the combination of sharp focus and shallow depth of field—particularly wide open at f/1.4—has me salivating for flower season. This should afford some cool looks with all the flora about the area that’s about to bloom.
Machinations of a Pastel Sky — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
For southeast New Jersey peeps a vantage to the north and east had it going on at sunset last night. Bailing on the traditional west by southwest exposure at sundown—which had nothing doing but clear skies—I did a 180 and posted up on the north side of Dock Road. A whole 20 foot walk from my usual spot. Whew! From there I let nature do the work. Admittedly I had a bit of trouble centering on the turning waterway while keep some rouge elements of the guardrail out of the foreground. With a little fiddling of tripod height adjustments I made it work. After that it was all just pushing buttons.
Heading into yesterday’s shoot on what was 4 March, I had been in a bit of a dry spell. I hadn’t been out doing the photo thing since 16 February, when coincidentally another striking east facing sunset took shape. Landscape photography is full of peaks and valleys; hot streaks and dry spells. When you’re at the mercy of weather, timing, and real life responsibilities, opportunities to shoot come and go. As tedious as it may become at the tail end of an extended hiatus, the reward of a steady supply of great light makes the wait bearable. If nothing else photography is a lesson in control—insofar as we ain’t gonna have it.
In other photography news: I picked up a long overdue 35mm lens yesterday. Fifth Prime I’m calling it as it joins my 14mm, 40mm, 50mm, and 100mm as the fifth prime lens in my bag. I’m excited to see what new opportunities this long coveted piece of glass affords me. I’m even thinking of dabbling in some people photography with this at my side—it will be interesting to see if this actually materializes.
Worse for Wear — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Eastern facing sunsets some days sing supreme—and while yesterday’s western exposure was a fast moving fiery red, it was to the pastel east that I focused my gaze. With the tide well up access to Barnegat Bay Beach was out of the question, eliminating any hope I had of working the wave runner jetty into my frame. Scanning for alternatives this derelict bulkhead—seemingly none too old but certainly in disrepair—thrust up its hand, eagerly volunteering as a workable foreground. The missing boards and rusted nails made a suitable fallback, and as I was dialing in the frame the grain pattern on the support poles had me mesmerized. The pole to the right in particular with its almost camouflage pattern array. A smattering of seagrass even found itself snagged upon the remnant nails. There’s just a ton of neat little things going on in there if you stop to take a closer look.
The strength of this photograph is all about balance. Composed of a largely symmetrical foreground squared up perpendicular to the bay and horizon. To the sky there’s a high pastel cloud deck, emblazoned pink that’s largely being blocked out by the fast moving low-level cumulus clouds that came racing overhead from west to east. For about 2 minutes they colored up just enough with a touch of red upon their underbelly. I’m torn as to whether these clouds were a welcome addition to my frame, or if they’re more accurately described as an ill-timed guest. They certainly bring some drama in the form of shape and contrast, but at the same time they blocked out what would have been a potent light show at the higher cloud levels to the east. For a time there were hints we’d replicate the eastern sunset from The Great Gig in the Sky, but in the end the timing wasn’t quite right. Embrace the chaos thusly.
Where do we go from here? — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Tucked in among the lifeless grasses, cloistered from the outside world though hardly sheltered from its inhospitable cold, I made my stand—kneeling. With an icy tripod widened and set to its lowest setting, I was low and I was close to a wee bit of opening—revealing a low level glimpse out to the frozen lake of Stafford Forge. With the sunset sky failing to produce much drama I fell back to making the most of the scene I was given; and it’s a shot I’ve made before. Sometimes you’ve just got to work with what you’ve got.
