Yesterday I discovered that my lovely wide lens, a Nikon 17-35mm f2.8 has decided to stop behaving as it should. In short the aperture ring has decided that it only likes f2.8 now and refuses to change. As such it has been sent away for servicing and I am left without a wide option for what looks like being a few weeks.
This is potentially a pain as it not only limits the range of pictures I take, but the wide lens has become my default lens for most jobs and losing this feels a little like losing an arm. There is a silver lining however, as I have a feeling that I have been overusing this option for some time and hope that in losing this lens I will start to become more creative in the pictures I am taking.
The pictures I have been taking using this lens have often seemed to follow the theme of placing an object in the foreground to draw interest, following this through to the main subject and then (hopefully) keeping a decent background.
This is a good example of a shot I will often take using a wide angle lens. It is composed to draw your eye into the picture through the foreground, in this case along the various cartoons. Your eye will naturally then rest on the cartoonist as direct eye contact is a very strong visual draw. Once there your eye travels to his wife, then following her gaze towards the card then on to the rest of the image. With shots like this I will usually expose the background first, maybe leaving it 2/3rds of a stop underexposed, and then lighting the subjects separately, as I find this gives the image more of a feeling of depth which is already encouraged by the composition.
Another image which follows this theme, using lines created by the hammer and chains to draw a line towards the subjects face. These areas are given importance within the composition as they are areas of high contrast. The background in this image remained quite dark, drawing attention to the artist and his sculpture, however it still retains enough detail to keep a feeling of depth and location within the image.
This image still follows two recurring themes in my work, firstly using the foreground to draw the eye into the shot, and the lines on the bike to draw the eye to the subject while the shadow of the wheel balances the composition and creates a natural triangle in the image. It also is an example of shooting from a low perspective to add a sense of importance and power to the subject, I have frequently been given a telling off on my return home for using this technique, as lying around on the floor often leaves muddy trousers.
While my pictures are not all similar in this respect, especially due to the variety of subjects and situations I find myself in along with a desire to keep my work fresh and interesting to produce and look at I have found myself using the same old format as a crutch, hopfully I will now be forced to branch out more, become more familiar with a long lens and come away with a greater variety of pictures, especially seeing as some of my favourite pictures have been taken on the longer lens.
The lines of the tree in this shot frame the subject and also act to give the image a diagonal composition which is easy to read visually. The long lens helps here by blurring the background while retaining the important details, making this a fairly simple shot, but one with a lot of visual impact.
This is an old shot but still one of my favourites. on the day it would not have been practical to shoot this on a wide lens, but even if it had the image would have lost its impact due to the amount of unwanted background detail such a lens would have captured. This image is unique in this series as it was not posed but works due to a strong focus on the womans eyes leading out the frame asking why she seems quite so terrified, in this case eye contact would significantly weaken the image. Compositionally everything else is an afterthought, although the man looking towards the eyes of his partner serves to reinforce the focus on her eyes, and his peaceful expression is a stark contrast to her terror.
It is also very very silly, which is nice…
Loads more pictures here
[...] me to adapt to new methods of shooting for some time now and the “me shots” described here which are dominated by a triangular structure have given way to shots like the ones seen below, [...]
By: Rectangles are the new Triangles. « Ramblings of a press photographer on March 25, 2010
at 12:05 pm