Younes Bounhar Photography

The Why and the How

In my everlasting quest to provide interesting content for you guys, I am always willing to try new things to see if you would enjoy them. For today’s post, I decided to try a new concept on Out of Focus called “the Why and the How”. What I would like to do here is go through the creative as well as technical process that goes behind my imagery. Let me know if you find it useful.

So, to start this feature, I chose to present on of my favorite shots in my portfolio. It is not my most popular, but to me it resonates more than most. It’s one of those shots, that you “just know” when you nailed it. The minute I got back from my shoot, I told my buddy that I would be happy if I never made another shot after I got that one (obviously, I was lying, cuz really the best shot is always the next one ). Anyhow, I digress…actually I am not done digressing cuz there is a funny story behind the title of this image that I have entitled “The Tower of Babel”. It was taken on the shores of the world famous Moraine Lake and shows a part of Mt Babel. Being the clever man that I am, I thought that I had the cleverest of titles with the Tower of Bible, only to realise that the tower in this scene is actually called…yes you’ve guessed it: the tower of Babel…so much for the clever title.

The Why

Anyway, enough digression…What was going through my mind when making this? Probably nothing, or at least nothing I can talk about here. Seriously though, I am standing in front of one of the most photographed landmark in the Canadian Rockies. Almost every single shot from this place is taken from the top of the boulders with a tree or two cutting the scene in front of you, you can see the 10 peaks, some alpenglow and a beautiful reflection on the placid lake. Great, been there done that. What I wanted was something that screamed original, yet gave a sense of the place. So, the image would have to show a mountain or two, the incredible blue of the lake and the lichen covered stones on which I was standing.

But to make it really unique though, Momma Nature had to lend me a hand. After all, it had been the 4th straight day I tried to shoot a sunrise here only to be welcome with the dullest grey sky! This particular day looked no different as low lying clouds completely covered the valley. As I was packing up to leave, the clouds started moving out real fast letting some incredible light through. There was my chance. I loved the look of the tower of Babel, and the clouds being pushed up from behind it were the perfect setting. The lichen covered stones provided the perfect anchor, somewhat mirroring the contour of the tower. My composition was set.

The How

From a technical standpoint this one was a breeze. Because of the size of the elements I wanted in the frame, a wide angle lens was a no-brainer. So I set my Sigma 10-20 at 14mm on a Nikon D70s. Since I wanted to show some of the rocks below the water surface, I used a polarizing filter at a minimal setting. Finally, in terms of exposure, the tower was hiding the sun, so that the differential would not be too hard to handle. That said, there was still a fair difference between sky and foreground. I used a 3 stop soft ND filter to bring down the exposure of the sky. An aperture of f/8,0 and shutter speed of 1/10 were then selected. To be frank with you, the f/8 looks a bit odd to me. I would normally have shot this at f/11 or f/13 as the lens is sharpest between f/8 and f/13, but the smaller aperture provides larger depth of field. Here the foreground rocks are far enough that f/8 has no negative consequences on sharpness, but to the contrary, the lens is at its sharpest here, so it all worked out in the end. This is one of those scenarios where the light was changing very very fast, and you just have to react and go with the flow.