Photo of the Week: April 23, 2012

Hi Gang!

This week’s POTW is a seascape from Curacao. Many photographers think of photographs like this one as a close-focus wide-angle shot (CFWA), a term coined by filmmaker Howard Hall back in the days when the Nikonos 15 mm lens was very popular. The idea in a CFWA photograph is to get very close to your strobe-lit foreground subject so that even though it might not be all that big in real life it fills a significant portion of your wide-angle frame. This technique is known as forcing the perspective. The objective is to draw attention to the foreground subject by seeing it from a point-of-view, or perspective, that we do not normally see.

The CFWA shot works especially well with foreground subjects that are attached to the substrate, or that are unlikely to swim away from you. Sea fans, soft coral, crionoids, giant clams, and artifacts on shipwrecks etc. often make ideal subjects for CFWA images.

When using a wide-angle lens your depth-of-field is usually rather large. However, your depth-of-field gets reduced the closer you get to your foreground subject. When creating a CFWA image you are likely to be very close to your subject so depth-of-field can be an issue.

If you have an element in the background of your frame such as a diver or a shark swimming in the background, you probably want that element to be in focus. The way to accomplish this goal while still getting close to your foreground subject is to shoot at a strong upward angle so that the water or other elements in the background are very bright. This will give you the ability to shoot with a closed down aperture such as f/11, f/16 or f/22. The more closed down the aperture, the greater your depth-of-filed, meaning the better chance you have for elements in the background of your shot to be in focus.

If your background is not as bright as you want it to be you can try slowing your shutter speed to enable you to close down your aperture to some degree without underexposing the background.

Closing down your aperture means that you might need to use a high-power setting with your strobe in order to get enough light on your foreground subject to properly expose it and bring out colors that are toward the red end of the spectrum

I hope these reminders help you create your own CFWA photographs, and that you enjoy this week’s POTW.

See you next week,

Marty