Archive for June 1st, 2009

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A few weeks ago I was working as a volunteer for a local NANPA event. At the event I listened to Rob Sheppard give a talk about some of the work that he was doing lately.  He called the presentation Voices from the Ground. Rob has been focusing on very low perspectives using very wide angle lenses. The one that he’s been using the most is a full-frame fisheye. His talk got me thinking about the perspectives that I use in my shots and challenged me to mix things up a little bit. I posted an image last week from the same outing. Putting the camera down below the ground level at Fern Spring allowed me to capture a perspective that I’d never seen before. 

This image was also a direct result of Rob’s talk. To get this view I had my tripod spread as low as it would go. (It was a bit of a trick keeping the legs out of the shot.) Since I wasn’t able to get low enough to see through the viewfinder, and my camera has no live view, I grabbed an angled viewfinder attachment that I keep in my bag. The next challenge was the range of light on the subject. I knew that the bright sun would cause my foreground to go dark so I did something that I almost never do; I used a flash. While I’m sure that many nature photography purists would be offended at such a notion, it fit the need. It wouldn’t have been the same shot without it. 

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