Misty Path | Weekly Photo #116
I’ve been quite busy over the few weeks and although I’ve been out with the camera here and there, photography has had to take a bit of a back seat during this time. Towards the end of July, I spent a week with my family in the beautiful county of Cornwall, down on England’s south coast. Although it was predominantly a family holiday, I did get to take the “proper” camera out for a couple of sunrise shoots both in the woodland to photograph some small waterfalls and along the coast to capture a snippet of Cornwall’s fantastic shoreline.
Shortly after returning from a rather active week in Cornwall, we travelled to Crete for 2 weeks of r&r in the sun. Although I’ve been to Greece a few times in the past, it was our first time visiting Crete and what little we saw of the island, it was incredibly beautiful. I rarely travel without my camera and this was no different so again, as I did in Cornwall, I ventured out a few times to take a few landscape photos while I was there.
I have lots of photos to process but I hope to share one of two of them here soon enough.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF10-24mm | 12mm | 0.4 Seconds | f/9 | ISO400
Back to this week’s photo.
When I started taking my woodland photography a bit more seriously, I avoided including footpaths in my photos. I felt all my woodland photos should be 100% natural, unspoiled, and without evidence of man. Although that's still the case for many locations I photograph, I quickly realised that this didn’t always tell the full story of the woodland I was in and how not only are they important to the plants and animals that live there, but these spaces are also important to people too, and if we look after them properly, the subtle marks we leave on them, such as these trodden pathways are also important to include when telling the full story. These days, I can’t get enough of them as compositionally, they work well to lead your eye through the frame and into the photo.
I took this photo in a local woodland just minutes from my home. It’s a varied woodland, set upon a hill along the North Downs (AONB) and although not particularly high (250ft), it does seem to get its fair share of misty/foggy conditions when the clouds are low. Being so close to my home and with a good chance of mist and fog, I often visit this woodland with the camera. Here are a couple of photos I’ve previously shared from this location:
Garlic Hill, taken back in the spring.
Chaotic Rhythm, a tangled, misty scene I photographed back in the winter.
On this wet, foggy day back in late spring, this group of trees in the distance caught my eye. I liked how they looked surrounded by the mist, so I decided to set the camera up, using the path as a part of the composition leading the eye towards the trees. Stepping off the footpath to the left, to allow the path to enter the frame on the bottom right, I felt there was too much visual weight on the top right-hand side caused by the larger tree closest to the camera. I needed something to balance the composition and I solved this by getting low to the ground to include these vibrant green leaves on the bottom left corner which did the job nicely.
With the camera on the tripod around a foot off the ground, I mounted my 10-24mm wide-angle lens. I chose to go wide for this shot as the leaves in the foreground would appear bigger and more of the footpath would be included in the frame to the right. I also used a circular polariser filter as the reflections created by the wet leaves were a little too distracting and this filter is perfect for cutting out those reflections while at the same time, making the colours pop.
With the foreground so close to the lens, even with a smaller aperture, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the shot acceptability sharp from front to back, so a focus stack was needed. I dialled in the settings (see under the photo above) and took three or four separate shots, each one focused on a different part of the image.
Back in post, I used Photoshop to blend the mages together using the “Auto-blend layers” option, creating a single photo that is sharp from front to back. There was a bit more to it, as some fine-tuning was needed to correct some issues with the blend as it was a bit gusty and the branches had moved a bit between exposures, but it was straight forward enough, and I’m really pleased with how this one turned out.
Until next week.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.