Rodney Campbell's Blog

I’d never shot in conditions like these before. I was loving it – compositions everywhere and the soft fog had this voluminous luminance – perfection. There were the five trees I was trying to work into a composition. I could see it clearly in my head but I had real troubles executing it to my minds eye.

Quintessential

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 62 mm, 1/80 sec at f/8, ISO 100

I think the real problem was that there were actually six trees next to each other and not five.

Pro Tip: The Rule of Odds. There’s this photographic adage that compositions are more pleasing when you include odd numbers of things – three, five, seven and so on. Somehow even numbers of things just doesn’t work as well.

So here I was trying to limit the view to 5. I first took this tighter crop with just 5 trees but I really wanted more negative space on the sides. So I widened the view to include all 6 trees with some additional space to the sides with the intention of cloning out that extra tree on the left. Unfortunately the end result wasn’t satisfactory. I could remove the tree fairly successfully but it just didn’t look right. See that tree on the right – it spreads out nicely on the right because nothing is there. On the left however that fifth tree is being pushed and cramped by the tree to it’s left. Thus removing that just leaves an unreconciled space. One day perhaps my Photoshop skills will be up to readdressing that and making that tree feel more whole. Until then this tighter view of the five trees will just have to do :).

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images below.

Cursed

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 230 mm, 1/160 sec at f/8, ISO 400

Hoar frost “growing” off the barbed wire. This stuff was all over the place so it was yet another drawcard this morning. Technically I should have switched to the macro lens (which I’d left in the house). I just had to make do with the long end of the trusty 28-300 I used all this morning.

Frosted I

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 300 mm, 1/100 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

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