Tortured Reflections 2

[Mark Schaefer]

Comments and critiques are welcome.


Click on any of the photos or here to enter the photo album where there are a few additional images. The above photo was taken at an old mill dam with a rough cut bluestone surface:

I am photographing the reflections from a close location, generally with high levels of magnification. As the water is fast moving I need to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion of the water. If I were to use a slow shutter speed, I would end up with a hopeless blur. I set the camera to ISO 1600 and shot with a wide open aperture. As with the Crystal Lake Reflection images, the surface of the water surface is not parallel to the camera's image plane, so I need to use a tilt lens to render the surface of the mill dam all in focus. The falling water is going out of focus, but that is not critical in the image. I am using the Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 L-series tilt-shift lens, with 1.4x and 2x teleconverters to provide additional focal length options. Shutter speeds were 1/200 to 1/1000 (whatever the wide open aperture dictated). Exposure compensations were used based upon my in camera review of captured images. All photos are straight out of the camera with no post processing adjustments or crop.

To illustrate raw subject matter I was working with here is the general scene. As you see there is nothing overly unique here. You can find this type of scene throughout the northeast. The key is to find a time of the day when the mill dam is in the shadows, and the foliage being reflected is in the bright sun.


These were taken one week prior to the Tortured Reflections 1. The water was much lower. There were many accumulated leaves on the dam surface which restricted what areas I could photograph. You might notice that the large log that was on the dam in Tortured Reflections 1 is not here. It came down the river during heavy rains in the intervening week. The high water did wash away the accumulated leaves. Rains and high water always create some and solve other problems.

 

[w7xman]

I think that the water treatment and the quality of colors and light in the bottom photo here makes it my favorite of the series. I might do a bit more work with the composition though to eliminate a few MINOR nits that I can see.

The line of the fall of water isn't quite straight, and the resulting shadow in the ULC is mildly distracting. It could be argued that it gives it a sense of place, but I might try rotating the photo slightly and cropping just a hair and see what you think.

I've enjoyed this series, and I think you've gotten some great commentary in the other thread as well!

 

[Mark Schaefer]

The line of the fall of water isn't quite straight, and the resulting shadow in the ULC is mildly distracting. It could be argued that it gives it a sense of place, but I might try rotating the photo slightly and cropping just a hair and see what you think.

Thanks for the comments, and I agree. It is almost a cardinal rule of composition that lines that are slightly off horizontal or vertical can be unsettling. It is either better to keep things plumb, or to make a more bold decision to go for a stronger diagonal as I did with the Tortured Reflection 1 photos.

Triangle slivers at corners are another cardinal sin. That black corner at the upper left of the second photo does not help the composition. I agree this could be rotated slightly so the fall line is vertical, and the black corner would be eliminated in the process. My current primitive editing tools don't allow for that, but I will be acquiring Photoshop CS3 within the month. In reality I could have used the perspective shift control in the Tilt-Shift lens, solving both problems in the camera / original image.