Changing Your Perspective

Sometimes you come across designs in nature that offer photographic possibilities but you're not there at the right time. And so you try to react the best you can at the time that you're there. classic case in point, looking up at these gorgeous Red Pine trees that were above us. High canopy, spindly trees going to the top, perfect situation for your widest angle lens to look up and just see basically a flower exploding into this, in the sky. So one of the great things about places like this, mother nature has a tendency to offer us wonderful locations on her own time.

And we're in a place now where these Red Pines have kind of a cathedral effect to them. The canopy is very high. There's no branches anywhere until you get way to the top. So it offers up a chance to be able to look up and get kind of a pixie stick approach to things by using a wide angle lens, spreading it out. And it just looks like pixie sticks with fur tops.

And right now, you know, one of the disadvantages of us being here is that we're relying pretty much exclusively on the design of nature because the sky is flat. The sky is bright. It's dark in here. So you're basically exposing just to get a graphic approach. Whereas when you come here on a blue sky day and you shoot up and you get blue in between those cracks, it's spectacular.

This is also one of those great places to come and get night shots like the moonlight and through stars because you look up and see a long exposure. You actually see the sky coming through this. And so the pattern interrupts the sky but yet you see the stars what have you coming through it. So, this is just one of these things, you know we've come from the top of the hill we're going back down to the lake and you know you've got this wonderful sense of nature here. Why bypass it?

And you know, you just bounce up. You've got a great canopy, focus on infinity, whatever you want to focus on the canopy, take your shot. You've got this, wonderful graphic shot of the Red Pines here at Blueberry Point. All right, we've got a great little spot here where we've got a bog out here in the forest that we can circle. And it's a great spot for shooters because it's a short loop so we can kind of trade off getting shots.

So I've come to a spot here in this bog where it's fairly monochromatic. Again, the light's kind of flat but it's a great place where we've got kind of an S curve in the trail. And the reason that's important is this, think about this. If you've got a string of dogs running straight at you, all you see is a straight line. Whereas if they're going around a curve, like this you see all of the dog teams and the musher in the same shot.

So you kind of want to pick your spots. I mean, the dog team coming straight at you is two-dimensional. A dog team going around the curve is three-dimensional so it's kind of an important consideration to make. So one of the great things about this, if you notice my angle I'm low and whenever you're shooting things like dog sledding, you know the human perspective standing up is the same perspective we see every day. You want to get great shots of dogs you gotta be dog and getting down low really kind of, it helps accentuate their power and their drives are coming in.

Now there's a couple of things you can do depending upon where you are in shooting, focus wise you can either go to manual focus and pick a point and then let them run through it. Or you can risk using auto focus if you're good at it and having your point predetermined. But then you have to decide what it is you want to focus on, the musher, or the lead dogs. Oftentimes people look at the lead dog first. So here they come again.

And I'm shooting a long lens because I don't want to compress the scene. Because it's a forested scene, but this is where the auto focus sometimes if you're not good at it, not used to it you're not quite sure what it's going to focus on. So you just have to be careful. Fantastic, good doggies, good doggies!