Fall Leaf Study: Inadvertent Study in Large Format Focus
I recently made 4 images of a set of leaves in my village. The colors looked spectacular as I walked Mollie in the morning. So I set off from my house with the Intrepid pre-set and focused for looking at the ground so I would minimize the setup time and fuss in public. I hate photographing, especially large format, with an audience as I feel self-conscious and then have difficulty focusing on the task. Having the camera pre-set and mounted on the tripod slung over my shoulder should minimize my time there.
It turned out to be more troublesome than I thought as the wind was strong and gusty and I had underestimated the degree to which the wind moved the leaves. Indeed minute to minute my entire palette of leaves might change as new ones dropped in and others were scrambled on the ground.
I setup the tripod in an area of leaves. It was difficult to decide a 'composition' as it was just a mat of random leaves. My first photo I took on Fuji Astia. I have a lot of the stuff and it all seems good quality. I like it for fall colors. I used my 150mm lens. I contemplated a 210mm but wanted to capture a larger mosaic. A wide angle would have cause trouble avoiding the tripod legs without a lot more tilt and rise complications.
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| Fall Leaves (Astia version, 150mm) |
The depth of field is not big so I opted for shooting pretty wide open at f8-f11 so my shutter speeds would be on the order of 1/4 to 1/8 of a second. With all the unexpected wind movement a faster shutter speed seemed wise.
Of course the trouble with shooting more open apertures is the focus needs to be very accurate across the sheet of film. Interestingly I was thinking that I need to work more on my focus skills. Some of my earlier work has shown some lack of attention to detail in the edges and corners. This session would drive the lesson home. The next photo I took on some expired Ektachrome I bought. This would be the first of the batch of about 70 sheets so I would use this to evaluate the quality of the batch and how much money I wasted.
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| Fall Leaves (Ektachrome version 150mm lens) |
For this second shot I move the tripod and camera to a different area of leaves. I thought 'no need to check focus as nothing has changed' Wrong!. This came out extremely soft on closer examination. The good news is the film is in great shape. No color casts or other anomalies.
The last two I shot in Ektar as I wanted to see what if any difference there would be. There was a lot of wind movement so each shot had a risk of disaster. The scene was pretty evenly illuminated so the two chrome films would have contained the full range of light. The last of these lacked focus and showed some movement blur as well.
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| Fall Leaves (Ektar version #1 150mm lens) |
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| Fall Leaves (Ektar version #2 150mm lens) |
Out of four images I have one I am truly happy with technically the others all have focus problems. This has lead me to resolve to work harder on checking all aspect of the image focus.
Looking at the whole image it is difficult to see the softness of the out of focus images. (All images have had unsharp mask applied.) Here I compare the same patch from the center of each image where I crop at 50% zoom.
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| Clockwise starting upper left Astia, Ektachrome, Ektar 2, Ektar 1 |
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| Clockwise starting upper left Astia center, Astia left edge, Ektar 2 center, Ektar 2 left edge |
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