Portknockie, Moray, Scotland
This is basically what landscape photography is about for me. Choose your moments well, marry up the anticipated weather with tide times and seasonal variation and hope with the odds in your favour that something beautiful comes to pass. I arrived at the Bowfiddle stacks on the second day after lock down with my son Ben, 90 minutes before sunset which at this time of year is around 10.10pm. On arrival I could see crepuscular rays exploding into the sea through a low bank of cloud with a clear line of light beneath. I hoped that the red light of the setting sun would eventually drop below the cloud and for a few minutes send raking low light across the sea and light up the stacks. It did just that and the rocks turned blood red beneath a suitably heavy steely grey sky. Staggeringly beautiful for just 90 seconds, even Ben was suitably amazed.
FujiFilm GFX 50S ,Fuji GF 32-64mm Zoom
0.6ND Reverse Grad and Polariser, f/26 at 5 Seconds, ISO 100
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Hi Ian,
The clouds are magnificently moody and the light is red and sublime. I like the processing alot. 5 sec exposure makes the waves look amazing to me. The edge of the frame looks clean. What a special place and time you captured.
I have a nit perhaps on composition in creating depth. I feel the rock in the center right of the frame is distracting perhaps. The rocks on the lower right of the frame, along with the rocks on the left center side create a triangle pointing to the focal point rock in the center. If the center right rocks were omitted it would be powerful triangular leading lines. Just an observation.
All in all a beautiful scene!
Beautiful light and colors. I noticed that you shot this at f/26. It’s my understanding that higher f stops need to be used in MF cameras due to shallower DOF. However it’s often recommended to not shoot at f stops greater the f/16 in full frame camera lenses. Is that not true for MF lenses?
Hello Igor. As you know I shoot mainly on film with a Pentax 67, the silver halide crystals are relatively flat and even at minimum apertures, I use f/32 and f/45 (90-180 zoom) the physical hole that lets the light through is relatively large compared with full frame (4.5 times the surface area), without going into the Physics of diffraction I suspect light is not affected quite so dramatically and the image not “softened” to the same extent. Certainly the trannys are very crisp from a scan right into the corners and whilst I can see a smidgeon of difference between these apertures and something more modest (f/16). I consider the following rules apply in landscape photography, where generally speaking, everything is required to be pictorially sharp, namely, “I think it is better to have an image that is universally acceptably sharp throughout a photograph than it is to have an image that is noticeably unsharp compared to other zones of the same image as a result of inadequate depth of field”. It is more easily noticed by folk (general public) when looking at a print that the latter is sharp in the foreground or in the background but not equally sharp everywhere. Granted this is a cop out when technology enables the like of focus stacking to be applied to more acceptable apertures (especially relevant to digital) but, movement and particularly water make focus stacking more complex and frankly for me the advantages in time saving and terms of less post processing, simply doing the best I can in one “that’ll do” single exposure gives me much more joy in my photography.
As for medium format digital I am in the experimental stage. Can I reasonably use f/32 on my 32-64 GF zoom with all of Fuji’s internal camera lens correction technology? Well I have looked at the full resolution image and frankly marvelled at how crisp it is right into the corners front to back, thus far it is plenty good enough for me, easily compares plus a considerable bit more to my Pentax 67 trannies I did it in one exposure ( I needed extensive depth of field), spent no more than two minutes in post processing and I have at least the same joy of photography provided by my big old technically obsolete Pentax 67. In answer to your question then, I don’t really know and I don’t really care, they are sharp enough for me and if they are good enough for those that buy them then I am satisfied.
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