Skyward

This photo was quite unexpected, but I am rather pleased with how it turned out and would like to try this sort of thing again. I went on a brief photo walk with one of my coworkers the other day, and saw her looking up at the trees and taking snapshots with her iPhone. For some reason this concept had not really occurred to me before, and I thought I would try replicating what she was doing. She talked about how cool it was to see the leaves light up with the sun behind them, and she sure was right. It was a little tricky trying to nail the exposure, and it helped that I set the shutter button to lock exposure while using the back button for focusing. The other issue was aperture, as I had no idea what kind of depth of field I was even looking for. Since the screen on my D200 is so tiny it’s hard to visualize this when out shooting, so I tried a couple different values and but knew that anything beyond f/4 would probably not have much DOF to speak of. Thankfully this picture at f/3.3 worked out quite nicely. I had to tweak it a bit in post, but overall I am quite happy with the dynamic range I was able to capture without doing any sort of HDR trickery.