I'm currently reviewing the material I shot for a P.R. agency last Weds. and Fri. There are several hundred still images and about 30 minutes of video footage to wade through in order to extract whatever nuggets of gold, silver or tin might be mixed in with the footage and still frames we'd never want to use.
As I look through the material I feel like I made the right choice in using the 50mm focal length for most of the shots. The relationships and sizes see to work well and it's refreshing to be able to use a fast lens nearly wide open and not have to worry about getting enough sharpness.
I am constantly battling with some part of my brain that always seems to want to compose images too tightly. I am making a real effort to "put more air" around the things I shoot. I guess it's the result of shooting so many slides for so many years. When we put together slide shows we needed to keep the format, aspect ratio and sizes of the projected images the same. That mean we did all our composition in the finder at the time of the shot. Later, when digital was in its infancy, we cropped really tightly because I was worried about loosing any of the information in the frame. Enlarging seemed to mean an immediate reduction in quality.
Now, with bountiful pixels and infinite post processing it almost seems as though we should just put a 14mm on the camera and shoot everything with the idea of cropping out the sections that we want later.... (hyperbole alert...).
4 comments:
Put it together with light field tech so you can focus and set aperture in post. Now we're cookin'
We're still doing photography, it's just not clear *when*.
Kirk wrote, "Now, with bountiful pixels and infinite post processing it almost seems as though we should just put a 14mm on the camera and shoot everything with the idea of cropping out the sections that we want later.... "
Which is another argument for large sensors.
That portable EVF to bring Nikon into the current century is going to cause you back problems! :)
"it almost seems as though we should just put a 14mm on the camera and shoot everything with the idea of cropping out the sections that we want later...."
You laugh, but back when I was shooting a very slow Fuji S3 pro (Nikon D200 body with a Fuji sensor) I was trying to document a company volleyball outing. The action was so fast and the camera so slow, that I just gave up and threw a 17mm wide angle lens on the camera and cropped the interesting bits out for use later. In this case it worked because the images were for the company internal web site. It certainly made for a very relaxed shooting environment and let me concentrate on the moments rather than wrestle with the equipment. I highly recommend this approach! :)
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