Jock Elliott
Hall of Famer
- Location
- Troy, NY
Here I am floating a tentative theory about photographing the sky.
For over a decade, I have been trying to photograph the grandeur of the skies. It started out as simply trying to capture spectacular sunrises and sunsets, but since coming to Serious Compacts/Photographers’ Lounge a couple of years ago, it has morphed into an attempt to become a bit more serious about the whole thing, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
Sometimes it has gotten confusing: for a while, I thought that bigger sensors and more megapixels would lend themselves to grasping the epic dimensions of the sky. Then I thought perhaps it was the lens; a wide angle lens would suck up more of the scene that was tantalizing my eye and moving my heart. And, to be sure, the lens does play a part, but a wide angle lens, while capturing more of the sky, also tended to make the sky look “puny.”
Then two things happened more or less concurrently.
One. Ray Sachs pretty much crystallized the problem. He was responding to a post on post processing and said in part: “The sky and the clouds are HUGE and all of the peripheral darkness or whatever makes them seem that much more dramatic and there's so much that goes into making a gorgeous sunset seem so dramatic in real life. And then you take a photo that either pushes it away with a wide angle lens or draws it in with a telephoto (but only a really small PART of it) and shoves it all into a tiny little two dimensional frame.”
Two. I began experimenting with 16:9 aspect ratio and it seemed to work much better, as in the photo below.
But why? I began thinking about “either pushes it away with a wide angle lens or draws it in with a telephoto.” That is, of course, true. Depending upon who you read, a normal field of view for the human eyeball is somewhere between 35mm (e) and 50 mm (e). That would be the field of view than neither pushes the sky away nor draws it in, yet shooting with those lenses doesn’t seem nearly wide enough.
Then I read this: “In contrast to the camera, our eye/brain system scans a scene in many jumps called saccades and processes the incoming stream of information to capture what is important for our well-being.” That was in this article published on Luminous Landscape: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/e...lor_dealing_with_color_vision_anomalies.shtml
So, in essence, our eye/brain system is doing one of those stitch-together panoramas that some cameras can do, but we do it for ourselves all the time, automatically. Plus we have binocular vision with two eyes (mounted horizonally) providing peripheral vision and a wider field of view than you would get some a single eye.
So, for me, the 16:9 aspect ratio, in which the width is 1.77 times the height, with a wide angle lens, does a better job of replicating what I see in my mind’s eye when viewing the sky than an aspect ratio of 3:2 or 4:3.
Does that make sense to anyone else, or should I go back to The Home and start taking my meds again?
Cheers, Jock
For over a decade, I have been trying to photograph the grandeur of the skies. It started out as simply trying to capture spectacular sunrises and sunsets, but since coming to Serious Compacts/Photographers’ Lounge a couple of years ago, it has morphed into an attempt to become a bit more serious about the whole thing, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
Sometimes it has gotten confusing: for a while, I thought that bigger sensors and more megapixels would lend themselves to grasping the epic dimensions of the sky. Then I thought perhaps it was the lens; a wide angle lens would suck up more of the scene that was tantalizing my eye and moving my heart. And, to be sure, the lens does play a part, but a wide angle lens, while capturing more of the sky, also tended to make the sky look “puny.”
Then two things happened more or less concurrently.
One. Ray Sachs pretty much crystallized the problem. He was responding to a post on post processing and said in part: “The sky and the clouds are HUGE and all of the peripheral darkness or whatever makes them seem that much more dramatic and there's so much that goes into making a gorgeous sunset seem so dramatic in real life. And then you take a photo that either pushes it away with a wide angle lens or draws it in with a telephoto (but only a really small PART of it) and shoves it all into a tiny little two dimensional frame.”
Two. I began experimenting with 16:9 aspect ratio and it seemed to work much better, as in the photo below.
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
But why? I began thinking about “either pushes it away with a wide angle lens or draws it in with a telephoto.” That is, of course, true. Depending upon who you read, a normal field of view for the human eyeball is somewhere between 35mm (e) and 50 mm (e). That would be the field of view than neither pushes the sky away nor draws it in, yet shooting with those lenses doesn’t seem nearly wide enough.
Then I read this: “In contrast to the camera, our eye/brain system scans a scene in many jumps called saccades and processes the incoming stream of information to capture what is important for our well-being.” That was in this article published on Luminous Landscape: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/e...lor_dealing_with_color_vision_anomalies.shtml
So, in essence, our eye/brain system is doing one of those stitch-together panoramas that some cameras can do, but we do it for ourselves all the time, automatically. Plus we have binocular vision with two eyes (mounted horizonally) providing peripheral vision and a wider field of view than you would get some a single eye.
So, for me, the 16:9 aspect ratio, in which the width is 1.77 times the height, with a wide angle lens, does a better job of replicating what I see in my mind’s eye when viewing the sky than an aspect ratio of 3:2 or 4:3.
Does that make sense to anyone else, or should I go back to The Home and start taking my meds again?
Cheers, Jock