High Wind & Low Brush

wfeller

Hi. Here's my problem- My favorite places and times to shoot often involve high and gusting winds. To aggravate the situation I prefer small apertures and long and/or multiple exposures. The colors and light are exactly what I'm looking for, but details in the low brush are usually blurred.

I've tried many physical solutions like shooting during breaks in the wind, keeping away from trees and tall bushes and even modifying what I like to nearly barren and rocky environments. Somehow, something living gets into the shots, and I end up with unsatisfactory photos.

So, is this something nature has singled me out for? Do others have this problem, and how do you deal with it? The best I've been able to come up with is the use of feathered, artistic filters in CS2 and using PP to fix 'bad' photos.

Here's an example using the palette knife filter. The top is untouched (probably just too blurry (?) from camera shake). Midway down is filtered and the bottom third is more heavily filtered;


Here's a 100% cropped detail;


On the web I can 'get away' with it, but for prints, which I'm hoping to sell, will the general public find this technique acceptable? Help, suggestions, career alternatives?

Lovesong

If most of your blur is due to camera shake, then perhaps it's time to get that tripod. The original picture looks great BTW.

If you think the wind is strong enough so that it blurs your objects, how about try increasing the ISO- the D80 is fantastic even at ISO 400. This will allow you to have a faster shutter speed, and hence less blur. Just a thought.

wfeller

Lovesong wrote:

If most of your blur is due to camera shake, then perhaps it's time to get that tripod. The original picture looks great BTW.

If you think the wind is strong enough so that it blurs your objects, how about try increasing the ISO- the D80 is fantastic even at ISO 400. This will allow you to have a faster shutter speed, and hence less blur. Just a thought.

I'm thinking that's about the best I can do for an immediate solution. I'm wasting my time thinking I can fix a bad shot with PP. In the long run though I'm going to have to actually learn the craft and do some serious changes in equipment strategy. Thanks.

dbd

Wind in the foreground can actually produce effective images. I've seen some of Galen Rowell's work at the Mountain Light gallery in Bishop California. One of his Mono Lake sunrise images has sharp distant mountains and side to side blur in the close up brush. You can almost feel the wind when you stand close to the large print. The exposure time was 1/4 second.

The pictures posted here do not look in focus anywhere and don't show any prefered direction of blur that might be due to wind driven motion.

One of the characteristics of modern digital cameras with auto focus capability is that the mechanical adjustment range of the focus control allows excursions past the point of focus at infinity. This is required to allow the auto focus search to overshoot and recover without 'hitting the wall'. In manual focus mode you have to be careful to actually focus at infinity and not beyond. To make this even harder, digital eye-pieces can be hard to focus with in low light. A diagnostic clue is that nothing is in focus.

If your camera has been buffeted by wind, the result usually shows an obvious direction of smearing at points of high contrast. I have enough experience with both of these modes that I can say that they are easy to tell apart in exposures of less that a few seconds for scenes with strong highlights.

I haven't found any means of recovery besides reshooting. If you think that's annoying, stitch 8 images into a panorama and then discover you bumped the focus ring past infinity when you panned the camera for the sixth or seventh shot.

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

wfeller

Thanks Dale, I appreciate your eye and comments. Hopefully I can get my focusing issues turned around on this.

Also, thanks for reminding me about Galen's photography. I should have burned it into my memory deeper last fall when I had the opportunity.

pathfinder

One alternative for shooting landscapes, would be to use older, NON-AF, fixed, prime lenses and avoid the issues of AF altogether. Older, non-AF fixed primes will be very sharp on an APS sensored body since the sensor is much smaller than the full frame the older 35mm lenses were designed to cover.

It is easy to find mount adapters for EOS bodies to use non-EOS lenses, but it is much harder in the Nikon world. I think there are some adapters that allow the use of M42 mount lenses. The older Adaptall mount from Tamron might still be found. Worth looking around a bit for.