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Friday Slide Show: Weathered Wood
5 June 2020
Furniture, fencing, planters, palettes. The weathered wood in the back yard has several different duties.
Some of it predates our 17 years here. That would be fencing. And some of it will outlast us. Fencing again.
The planters and furniture are not long lived but much loved anyway.
We thought the weathered wood of our back yard would make an interesting project. So we took photos on a couple of occasions, checking our work as we went along to inform our focusing, mainly.
We were using a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor on a Nikon D200. If ever there were a more rapturous shutter sound, we haven't heard it. We could just sit on the ground, close our eyes and press the shutter button every few minutes to keep a smile on our face.
Going monochrome unified the set of images very nicely.
Focus is manual on that lens. And it can be hard to dial it in. So we just leaned back and forth looking for the two moments focus blurred and tried to prop ourselves up in between them.
That worked pretty well.
We changed aperture from our preferred f2 to f2.8, f8 and f11 as the depth we wanted in focus changed. That's really just two settings: shallow (f2 and f2.8) and deep (f8 and f11).
There are two each to cheat toward one or the other end. We do the cheating by feeling, too.
Captured as Raw files and converted to DNG, they had color information but we wanted to eliminate color as a distinguishing characteristic. It was too distracting between the grayed redwood and the green redwood.
Not to mention the various backgrounds that unavoidably intruded.
Going monochrome unified the set of images very nicely. You appreciate the texture of the weathered wood, its raised grain, its rough edges, the nail heads, the metal hoops, the knots and knot holes.
We thought we'd be lucky to have six images to show you, but we fell in love with 19 of them.
Who says sheltering in place isn't a thrill?
