Finishing up the article on travel lenses, I wanted to pick out a few photos to illustrate my points. It seemed like we were the only tourists around as we wandered the dusty paths inside the small buddist temple site. A few of the monks were out ejoying the nice day and fresh air. Considering we already looked out of place, I was glad the camera around my neck wasn’t so huge that it drew unneeded attention.
As we were leaving I spotted this man looking us over. I loved the contrast of his colorless traditional clothing symbolizing and the vibrant color of the traditional homes they live in. I set my lens as wide as it could go to bring in as much of the building as possible. Because I was using Nikon’s 18-200mm lens, which has an incredible range, just after this shot was taken I was able to zoom all the way in and grab another shot of his shoes with out moving from where I was standing. So in just a few seconds I went from an incredible wide angle view of 18mm to a close up maxed out at 200mm.
Having a high powered zoom often means the difference between perfectly isolating the subject, or ending up with a shot with so much distracting background activity that the photo loses its power. One of the palaces we visited had a team come out and perform traditional Korean nori drumming complete with spinning sang-mo hats. The problem was that there were so many people surrounding the dancers that I had to plan the shots carefully to not fill my frame with other onlookers. Shooting at 200mm I was easily able to do this.
In addition to focal length, I had to be aware of the aperture and shutter speed. I wanted to show just enough movement in the picture to illustrate the spinning hat, but not enough to blur the dancers face. This can take experimenting and practice with shutter speeds. I was able to get a beautiful shot showing the hats full motion from behind nearly freezing the ribbon mid swing. Both shots were taken with a shutter speed slightly faster than 1/300th of a second.
Put a little planning into your next trip and what gear you bring and you’ll have shots to appreciate for years to come. Good luck!
Chas
(The entire Korea gallery is here.)
3 Comments
Nice post. I favorited your blog and your rss feed.
This is the way things should be, get off what we are on now
Commenting usually isnt my thing, but ive spent an hour on the site, so thanks for the info