Tag Archives: foliage

Against The Light

by John Thurston

Against The Light

Looking over my earlier efforts at winter landscapes, I decided that my lighting decisions were too conservative and would never capture the feel of a winter snowscape. In February of 2014, I tried to change that by using more aggressive sun angles and shooting into the light. I didn’t want to go full contre jour because so much of what I find engaging are the textures of the surfaces, and MF3D is superb at capturing textures.

Here, I tried to position the camera so both lenses were shaded by the distant trunk, and positioned a flash on the left. I then waited while the earth turned, and tripped the shutter as the shadow-line reached the camera.

The result is the the best representation I’ve been able to make of a Juneau winter day. The sky isn’t blown out, but is a featureless sea with a floating sun. The trees are more than silhouettes and able to contribute to the story.

Dripping Foliage

by John Thurston
Foliage at Cowee Creek

Foliage at Cowee Creek

While this film was exposed in February of 2014, I only mounted this image recently and Boris’s foliage efforts prompted me to include it in the folio. While it lacks the diversity of color most people associate with “foliage”, I hoped the medium would be able to convey the textures and details I found that day.

I have been generally dissatisfied with the winter landscapes I’ve made, so tried to do this session differently. Rather than try to frame with the sun behind or safely off the lens, I shot into the sun or let it come aggressively in from the side. This is a “from the side” shot with at least one Vivitar 285 providing fill against the natural light. I didn’t make a lighting sketch, but I suspect there was one above the camera and a stronger one firing from the right.

Foliage

by Boris Starosta

Last fall, I got on a foliage kick.  Finally, after many years of dismissing foliage imagery as “beneath me,” I thought, okay, it does look pretty spectacular, and maybe MF3d would be a good way to capture the beauty of some of our foliage here in Central VA.  So for a couple of weeks I went around shooting foliage.  Most of the shooting was digital video, actually, and there’s a video I ended up publishing on YouTube, best seen on a 3DTV in HD:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1mU646qYeM

But some of the trees I found were SO spectacular, digital could not do them justice.  One of them is in the view I’ve put in this folio “Foliage.”  I loved the structure of the tree, and the many different colored leaves that it had on display: lots of yellow and red, to be sure, but also greens and browns.  The mid-morning sun was backlighting the leaves to brilliant effect.   I had first been attracted to this tree, because it was dropping leaves.  I was trying to get video of leaves coming down towards the camera(s).  But then I noticed the tree for its own sake…  The next day I went back to the tree, bringing the Sputnik and some rolls of Velvia, and it really captured the colors beautifully.

This view is almost as it would be if you were lying on your back underneath the tree.  And I could have done so all day!  Who needs TV, with trees like this right outside?  The tree was in a busy part of UVA campus called “The Corner,” but you’d almost never see anyone taking notice of it.  Truth be told, I had not noticed this tree until this fall, when I was really looking for foliage imagery, and I’ve been in that general area thousands of times over the past 30 years.