There is a nice bridge in Glen Lyon, with a waterfall behind it. Unfortunately, there are is a clump of trees in front of it.
You need a longish lens, fully open to push the branches of the trees out of focus, and you have to focus manually to avoid the camera selecting them. It would be nice to use a tripod, but given that you are standing at the edge of a single track road, this isn’t really possible.
I don’t think that anything can be done to redeem this, but I would be interested to see if anyone can do anything with it.
Any criticisms of the technique used in taking the picture, or suggestions to improve this are welcome.
I think the main problem is, that you used aperture 2.8. The only somehow sharp thing is the waterfall (I think the focus is even behind it). But I think you wanted to picture the bridge as well. There was enough light for closing the aperture a bit, so that both bridge and waterfall are sharp.
Oh and if the greens in between are irritating AF, focus manually.
I was aiming for both bridge and waterfall being sharp, but I was worried about using a narrower aperture giving me too much depth of field, and hence putting the branches into focus.
This is one that is going to niggle me, I will go back at some time with a monopod. This should allow me to use the screen to focus, rather than the viewfinder. I can then use the camera’s pinpoint focus mode.
I understood your intention. Anyway I think with 125 mm an aperture of 4 or 5.6 would have been open enough to keep the branches in between soft and yet the depht of field large enough for both, bridge and waterfall.
I don’t know how far away the subject was. But maybe you want to use a calculator like this to estimate if aperture 2.8 is giving you a large enough depth of field for both, bridge and waterfall.:
For 15m I get a depth of field of 2,5 m using aperture 2.8. For 5.6 the calculator depth of field doubles to 5m. If you was nearer this range is reduced quite quickly.
A crude estimate on Google maps gives a distance of 40m from the road to the edge of the river. If you add another 10m to the bridge, then at 2.8 the DoF is 39 →68m, at 5.6 it is 32 →109m.
As you say, f5.6 would probably be the better bet.
I did use manual focus, but only through the viewfinder.
As is usual, there is a compromise to be made. In this case, it is how long you are prepared to stand in the road getting things right. The traffic is minimal, but it only takes one car…
I think the plan is:
There is no room on the single track road to safely use a tripod. I will use a monopod connected to the tripod mount ring on the lens
I will use Live View mode and pinpoint autofocus on the bridge to get the best focus that I can
I will take several pictures at a series of different apertures.
The D850 has built-in focus stacking, so I will use this and see if a stack will enable me to just get the bridge and the waterfall in focus.
Ideally, what I should do is jump down the bank to the edge of the river, but I suspect that I would need a rope to get back up again…
i often use my tripod over my shoulder with 10s delay, or if i’m not alone, with the tether app in order to “drone” my camera. when i’m alone i use burst shooting, my fuji makes something like 5 pictures with a single press, of course it’s not that easy to center the subject. manual focus point setted before.
This gives you about 1.5 meter more height. Also i have a little saw for little branches/grass in the car.
Many MILC cameras have focus peaking, which highlights the areas in focus. Often this happens with the largest aperture automatically, but often the camera can be told to use the desired aperture to focus peak. I find this adequate to judge DoF.
Mine has still a mirror, even so my plans this year are to switch too a mirrorless. The used Nikon D850 of @epeeist is as well a SLR. I don’t know if it has such a feature.
Sorry, I missed that. But an SLR should allow assessing DOF directly without any trick (I miss this feature of SLRs, also the ability to assess shadows/highlights, even fancy OLD EVFs lose a lot of detail compared to the human eye).
You mean the button to close the aperture to the set value? As a glasses wearer I find it not good enough to judge the depth of field reliable. And especially on higher numbers the viewfinder gets that dark that it becomes completely useless. At least for me on my camera (EOS 90D).
