The Path

I’ave always had an affinity for pictures where there is some kind of road, path, or track leading the viewer’s gaze off into the horizon. I’ve put a few like this up on Weekly Fifty over the years, and something about this kind of scene just feels like…possibilities. I dunno. It’s kind of comforting to come across a scene like this in real life, snap a picture, and have the image be a fairly accurate representation of the time and place that you experienced in person. That’s what I have here, and I hope it gives you, the viewer, a similar feeling.

This is a path at a park not far from our home, and I shot this while I was out playing frisbee disc golf with my two boys on a hot August morning. We have a few spots for disc golf here in town but none with this level of shade or this easy to get to, and that makes it an ideal place to while away the hours with our boys especially during the summer. Most of the time when we go here I don’t bring my camera but on this particular day I figured I would take my D750 and 50mm lens just for fun and see if I could get a couple good shots. This image wasn’t difficult to capture and there’s nothing especially noteworthy about it, but that’s not really the point. I had fun taking this shot and I learned a few things in the process, which is good enough for me :)

So what do you need to take a picture like this? A small aperture, a fast shutter or a tripod, and a point of view that’s kind of close to the ground. If you use a wide aperture like f/4, f/2.8, or greater you run the risk of having the foreground or background out of focus due to a shallow depth of field, and most lenses aren’t quite as sharp at wide apertures either. I shot this at f/8 to avoid both of those issues and also knelt down to get a more interesting angle, took just a couple shots, and then went back to tossing frisbees with my kids. This was the kind of picture I didn’t want to over-think, and I’m glad I didn’t. Maybe I could have gotten a different (possibly better?) image with a lot more time and tinkering, but that would have been time I didn’t spend with my kids. And that’s a tradeoff I didn’t want to make.