Join Justin Reznick for an in-depth discussion in this video Compressing the depth of the forest to get the composition, part of Landscape Photography: Washington's Olympic National Park.
- When you think of a forest you think of trees. Or at least that's what I do. I think trees are amazing. And here in the Pacific Northwest there's just an abundance of these tall, incredibly colorful even, trees that just everywhere in the forest. But how do we tell that story? This is extremely complicated and I'm really excited to share this technique with you. We're in the Sol Duc River area where, because a river is carved through the forest, we have separation.
First thing is separation. You have to get away from the trees in order to photograph the trees. So here we are, approximately 40 to 50 yards away from the nearest tree and we're gonna use our long lens again. And we're gonna use a secret called compression. When we're able to compress the trees together, and what I mean is to make them appear closer together than they really are, that's when you can make a fantastic image of trees.
So what we've done is we've isolated a group of very tall, straight up trees with beautiful green foliage at the base. We're zoomed in, we're about 200 millimeter. And we've really focused our attention on that segment of the forest. And because we have this distance we're able to zoom in and compress. The more you zoom in, the more compression you can achieve. Now, there's a lot of depth in this forest which means I'm gonna shoot this at F22, a very small aperture to maximize depth of field.
So I did some experimenting with zooming in, zooming out. After I shoot horizontal I'm also gonna try vertical. And from this point we're gonna go to live view. Make sure we have polarization. Lock our focus. And go ahead and take an image. We have ISO 400, F22 at 8 tenths of the second. I chose ISO 400 because I don't want a four or five second exposure.
I want it to be less than a second because that green foliage, I don't want any movement. So let's take a shot. We're gonna review for sharpness. It looks excellent. Now let's do some experimenting. So let's try zooming in or out a little bit. Just give us variety, give us choices. This is a very abstract, interesting image and it's difficult to know you've got it right here. So we're gonna do some experimenting. I love to use the viewfinder for composing.
You'll often see me using live view but that's after I've achieved the composition. The viewfinder is perfect for composition because it doesn't have any peripheral vision to distract you. It's just the scene. Now for this composition I've included a cabin that's also in the scene. The previous one I excluded it because I wanted it to be abstract and very nature orientated. Here, I have a hand of man, so I've got a building in it. It may not be the one I go with but again, having that variety is really important.
Now the next step, after you check for sharpness, is you're gonna go to vertical. And because I've got a long lens on I have a tripod collar. And the beauty of the tripod collar is all I do is twist and spin. A lot of long lenses come with a tripod collar. Some don't and you can usually buy an optional accessory. I really recommend a tripod collar for all your long lenses.
Now because we shifted 90 degrees. We went from horizontal to portrait we have to re-polarize. We're gonna zoom in and out until we have the composition we like. Now, as I'm looking at this it's not doing it for me. It really was a horizontal but I've taken the time to set it up. It's not gonna take much time to finish and take the image. Now compressing elements in a scene is something I really love to do and that's with the long lens.
There's another course, in landscape course that I did in the library. It's photographing the Palouse in Washington State and I deal with a lot of long lens techniques, including compression. This scene really lent to that. So I recommend you watch that course as well. This could be my favorite image of the day. It's one of those things that you don't see very often and it's a very special technique. I'm just really excited about it. So y'know, this has been a great adventure in the Sol Duc valley, I think we should explore another part of Olympic National Park.
- Defining the HIPS acronym for the shooting workflow
- Taking a serene shot of a creek
- Shooting waterfalls
- Isolating trees in a forest
- Getting a macro shot of the forest floor
- Shooting reflective pools
- Using a tilt-shift lens for a panorama
- Shooting fall foliage
- Comparing polarized shots