Landscape and Wind, How to make?

[sergey___]

Hello,

The problem is to make a landscape with wegetation when the weather is

windy. At place, where I live now, there is a wind practically all the

time.

What do you do in such a case?:

Larg aperture? fast film? Or skip this landscape?

Suppose that light is very nice.(and therefore not midday-bright)

 

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Excuse me for bad English.

Best Wishes.

Sergey.

[bruce_rubenstein___nyc]

Light is probably the most important thing, if it's good, "go with the

flow". Use a longer shutter speed so that the vegetation is real

blurred, rather than just unsharp. So long as there are stationary

objects that won't be moved by the wind you should be able to get a

nice effect.

[don_baccus]

As is pointed out in the first place, making the vegetation

intentionally blurry is certainly one option.

 

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The problem with making the vegetation sharp is that a small aperture

leads to long exposures, while short exposures lead to large apertures

and too little depth of field. This is where cameras that can change

the plane of focus - view cameras or tilt/shift lenses for box

cameras - help. Shifting the plane of focus let's you keep that field

in focus with a larger aperture, letting you use a higher shutter

speed. This probably won't help you take such photographs yourself

as apparently you're not a large format shooter and tilt/shift lenses

are either very expensive or unavailable for most 35mm or MF systems,

but will help you understand why you see such photos in books and

magazines that are sharp throughout.

[sergey___]

Thank You for the answers!

I will try to bloor.

As for LF: I have some experience with it, and with 150mm lens at 4x5

I found, that can not use aperture larger then about f11 even with

tilt, becouse of small DOF. That is particulary source of question.

May be Tilt/Shift with wide lenses in small format and big aperture

can help more. (I can assume that DOF is proportional 1/f^2 for the

same circles of confusion, isn't it?).

By the way. Thank You for the answers.

Best Wshes.

Sergey.

[glen_johnson]

Maybe this is why a 20mm lens is so popular for 35mm format

landscapes. Depth of field can be very high, even with apertures as

wide as f/5.6. If you further agree to make the compromise to use a

faster print film, instead of slide film, you can probably get the

shutter speed up high enough (typically 1/250th) to get rid of the

wind motion.

 

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Fuji's NPH 400 and NHG II 800 both offer excellent grain performance,

which is typically a big issue for landscape photographers. There

are many good b&w emulsions available too. Of course, if you've got

your heart set on Velvia, then you're going to end up disappointed. I

think you just have to skip these shots, or pretend that you like the

blurring. If you want to experiment with the blurring, you might

check out the workshop review on Maria Zorn's techniques to create

"artsy" images by using the wind as a creative tool.

[don_baccus]

Your observation regarding LF and the limited depth-of-field that

results is correct, of course. As you suggest, the wide-angle T/S

lenses for 35mm also benefit from the inherently greater DOF of the

smaller format. So, a 24 mm T/S 2.8 on a 35mm camera can be used

nearly wide open for such shots as you describe and still yield good

near-far DOF.

[frank_kolwicz]

Since this is repeated so often, and by a usually reliable source in this thread (Don Baccus), I have to make a clarification: tilt and/or shift can help with depth of field problems SOMETIMES! Those times are when the subject and composition do not have sizable vertical or horizontal subjects in the near or mid distance - a close view of trees, for example, like one of my posted photos in the nature photos section. The use of tilt (especially) in landscapes is handy for minimizing your aperture setting in open landscapes; deserts or tundra, for example, where you may have a low fore- and middle-ground and maybe mountains or other tall subjects only in the distance.

 

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In the several years I have been shooting with field cameras I have found that for the kinds of landscape, stillife and close-up subjects I most frequently want to photograph, lens movements are of no real help and always add problems of focussing the corners, besides. Most of my discarded (but otherwise good) images are due to some error in focussing with the lens tilted - this is certainly equipment related as well as a developable skill.

 

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Frank