Adapt, aka Plan but Welcome the Random

May 15, 2012  •  Leave a Comment

I've started this blog with this theme with my Plan but Welcome the Random post. And it just proved so true again. One day I went to a local park just for a walk with minimum equipment. Pretty much just the camera. And towards the end of the walk I found a pond partially covered with beautiful algae patterns. not a solid ugly green layer but these truly beautiful patterns! It was late in the day and while the back light worked nicely for the algae itself, it created a lot of glare on the open spots of water. So I planned to come back with a tripod and on a cloudy day. Cloudy day to do away with the glare, and a tripod to be able to stop down the lens and get a lot of depth of field to cover the whole frame at 200mm and a 45 degree angle.

Couple days later I was back as planned. An overcast sky, nice even light. But wait a minute! Where are my patterns?!? The overnight downpour and wind completely changed the surface of the pond and my beautiful patterns were replaced with the solid layer that I did not care for much. So what now? Leave?

No. Instead, I framed the pond with a somewhat wider view, got in some foreground grass, the water, and trees across the lake. I liked the clouds too but they were a bit on the brighter side compared to the lake and ground. Color was also lacking from the whole scene. I pulled out the Cokin Yellow Blue Varicolor Polarizer and added the colors back in. To make the clouds stand out even further I also used a 3-stop Cokin Graduated Neutral Density filter over the sky (both filters were in the Cokin P Filter Holder attached using the 72mm adapter ).

With this set up, I got some still shots in that looked like nothing I had from this park before and then I also activated the interval timer on my camera and let it clock away for almost half an hour every 5 seconds with the intention of trying a time lapse video since I had not taken one in a very long time. i ended up with 343 photos.

I am not sure how people do this frequently, let alone doing HD video. Just here, I had 3.3GB in the RAW files resulting in 0.5GB of exported 1920 x 1080 JPG files. All of that for 11 seconds and 30MB of the final product.

Anyway, back to the original theme. As you cans see the plan did not work out at all but it was a great opportunity to try different tools and different techniques. I had fun and am sure the practice will come handy on an occasion that will be perfect for the filters or for time lapse.

Have fun!


Comments

No comments posted.
Loading...

Visit one of my photo galleries to purchase prints and other photo products. Thank you for visiting!
Subscribe
RSS
Archive
January (2) February (1) March April May June July August September October November December