The Why and The How

A hectic schedule and a series of commitments have seriously reduced my “blog time” of late, hence the non-post yesterday…Thanks for your patience and understanding

Today is “The Why and the How day”. In the second instalment of this feature, I would like to discuss a photograph I made on a trip to Cuba earlier this year. You can’t help but fall in love with that place: the people are awesome, kind and genuine, the weather as magnificent as it gets, and the ocean, well, the ocean is of the “wow” category.

The Why

I had fairly limited opportunities to move around while there and I really wanted to get an image that not only reflects the beauty and serenity of the place, but also something that included a human element (which I often avoid doing for some reason). As the hut was being built, only the vertical stakes were put in place and left there for a couple of days, and it was really to my dismay that I found that the hut was completed (I thought that the stakes were very photogenic in and of themselves, but whatcha gonna do?). So to find a composition that included the one hut without the bridge on my right and the hut on my left was a bit difficult – you kinda lose the serenity, peace feeling if you have all those elements in your composition.

The How

As I mentioned above, I wanted a composition that only included one hut, yet needed a very wide angle to take advantage of the beautiful sunset colours and fit in the entire hut. I found that a focal length of 10mm was necessary (on a DX body, that’s 15mm on 35mm equivalent). This meant I had to play around for a while to find the right spot. No recipes here: take your camera off the tripod and move around til you find it. What is not visible here, is that I have water above my knees, in incoming tide, so the idea here, is you do what you have to do to get the shot, and that means getting your feet wet and your equipment exposed sometimes. This was shot about 20min after sunset so an exposure of 25s at f/16, iso 100 was required. Because I am shooting towards the east and because the water partially reflects the light from the sky, there was no need for graduated ND filters or exposure blending. There is only one element left however: a straight exposure, would have completely underexposed the hut, leaving it as a dark, featureless form. So to make it pop, I used a SB-800 flash and manually light the hut with a few burst (you can’t see me on the frame because of the long exposure, but I actually walked into the frame to light the hut properly – this takes a few tries not to get flash bursts in the frame). To better simulate the glow of evening light, I gelled the flash with a full CTO filter, hence the orange glow on the hut.