Q2MR - First Landscapes
Ok, I can’t really call these landscape photographs, not in the manner that I’ve come to practice landscape photography. All of these images were hand held and, at most, with a polarizing filter on. No tripod to allow extremely precise framing or time to contemplate the composition, no graduated or neutral density filters to darken too bright skies or to manipulate the exposure times. And, all of the photographs were all taken in bright sunlight pretty much in the middle of the day. Definitely not the pre-dawn or late afternoon image-making I prefer. Still, they’re photographs of the landscape and these images represent the first real, conscious and sustained efforts I’ve made at carefully examining the landscape with the Q2MR.
One of the nice things about An and Kit’s trip is that they like to experience both the built and the natural environment. Plus they both enjoy taking their time, which means that if I’m quick, I can take a few moments to compose an image and work with it. I certainly didn’t have that “set up the tripod and work an image for 45 minutes” type of time, but often enough I didn’t feel pressured to rush myself. Which meant that at several locations I was able to really explore the environment with my eye and work an image a bit.
The first such instance was our trip to the coast just south of Esposende. There we found a rocky outcrop along the beach and while An and Kit looked at various shells and rocks, Ann and I were making images.
Of all of the images, I think this one hints at what the Q2MR has to offer. It’s a crop of a built-in crop, but all the quality I need in an image is there. The various qualities of light as well as the differing textures of the surfaces are captured in the sensor and conveyed on a monitor. Most pleasing of all is that fact that the rocks in the small puddle look wet.
This was exactly what I was hoping for. Plus, this is from the .jpg copy of the image. I did very little other than cropping the image to get this to come out. I guess the nice thing about the wide dynamic range of this sensor is that in bright sunlight, one still has a lot of information across the board to work with and very little has to get lost.
Because I’m still experimenting with the camera’s capabilities I had to try a variety of other “types” of images. Some of them were more abstract, . . .
And others are obviously of the landscape. This was one of the images where I was regretting not having a tripod and my full-range of filters. But I made the image anyway just to explore the possibilities.
The next outing where I was able to focus on landscape images was on our trip to Sintra, where we went to visit a castle and spent quite a bit of time wandering the surrounding natural grounds.
I was largely disappointed with my efforts that day, but really it was a step too far. Photographing in woods at mid-day on a bright sunny day is not a recipe for success. Still, I managed a small detail that works as a sketch image that one can learn from.
The last landscapes are from our second trip to Peneda Gerês National Park. An wanted to see some of the creeks she’d seen in photos and we knew just the area to explore.
After driving a bit we stopped at a turn-out and decided to hike along a creek for a short ways. From the bridge, I was able to use the built-in crop mode to frame a drop in the creek (again wishing I’d had a tripod and neutral density filter). There were some clouds in the sky and I was able to get the image in less-than-full sunlight.
We worked our way around one side of the creek, to find an off-shoot that offered a nice juxtaposition of tree, rocks and water.
And we eventually made our way around to the other side of the creek and to a small sandy beach. There I found another image. For all its minor technical flaws, this is a telling image. It really has that film-like quality that I would get when I was shooting with my 4x5 camera. In fact, it’s precisely the type of image I would have made with my 4x5 - except with a tripod and using a bit more care in considering merging rocks. Still, it was an image worth making because, like the first one in this group of images, it tells a lot about the capability of the Q2MR.
We are so looking forward to getting back into a routine where we’re actually photographing.