It's autumn in South Africa again. In the Highveld, where I live, this means it's cosmos time - millions of seeds come into bloom, often in great sweeping patches of white and pink. The challenge is always finding a meadow of a decent size in a decent setting (minimal hand-of-man elements around) and in decent light.
I went out with my friends +Felix Reinders (www.felixreinders.com) and +Rudi van den Heever (www.linruphotography.com) to a local patch that looked promising. Being mindful of mistakes I made last time, I also made sure to take along my 70-200mm lens for some abstract attempts.
The patch was good.
The location was good.
The light was good(ish).
The 70-200mm lens rocked!
Here's one of my attempts using this lens for some abstract floralscapes - using a very shallow depth-of-field (DOF)...I hope you like it. I wanted to isolate a single flower or cluster of flowers against the setting sun and the myriad of flowers behind and around it...
Techs:
Nikon D3s
Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 VR-II @ 200mm
f2.8 | 1/400 SS | ISO-400
Morkel Erasmus
I've often recommended to wildlife photographers (on safaris I guide or online) that they should shoot wider to include more of the scenery, rather than merely trying to get as close as possible for as much detail as possible. One of the reasons I say this is that a very tight headshot could actually be taken anywhere (like in a zoo). Framing wider tells your audience a bit about WHERE the animal or bird found itself and WHAT it was doing. This does not always mean you should whip out a shorter/wider lens...sometimes it just means using your telephoto lens and not driving right up to your subject.
I'm a big fan of using the compression factor that comes with the super telephoto lenses to tell stories and enhance the overall composition by seeming to bring the compositional elements closer together than they really are. The photo below shows such an example. This male cheetah was photographed in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (Kalahari desert), and was scanning the Nossob riverbed for a potential breakfast target. The sun was just coming up and the light was sublime. I particularly liked how it was lighting up the shrubs and grasses around him, and a the camelthorn acacias in the distance. I chose to frame vertically (portrait orientation) to include the tree.
Techs:
Nikon D3s
Nikkor 500mm f4 VR-II
1.4x teleconverter
f5.6 | 1/640 SS | ISO-1600
Exposure Bias: -0.7
I hope you found this useful, and of course I hope you like the photo. Either way, drop me a comment and let me know what you think...
Cheers!
Morkel Erasmus
