Abstract Exposures by Motion & Moonlight

A few days ago I was sitting in my car by the seawall near my home watching fishermen surf casting along the beach. As the daylight faded, a nearly full moon began to rise in the east almost directly behind the fishermen. I hadn't intended to do any photography at the beach but since I've begun  working on a new book I keep a camera with me constantly. Within a few minutes the moon had lit up the water in a beautiful silver and blue pattern and I knew I'd end up shooting some photos. But despite how bright the moonlight looked on the water, the exposure timess were still far too long for handheld exposures--even when I raised the ISO of my Nikon D90 to its max of ISO 3200.

I considered getting out a tripod, but with such long exposures and with the fishermen constantly moving, casting, adjusting their lines, etc., I knew that a tripod wouldn't help all that much: the fishermen still wouldn't be very sharp unless I called down to them to stand still (not something they'd be too interested in if a fish hit one of their lines!). Anyway, just as an experiment, I started shooting handheld exposures (mostly of this one fisherman) with the lens resting on my steering wheel. I had to focus on him manually because, as bright as the water looks here, the camera was still having trouble focusing and I was shooting through the windshield (something I would never do unless I was after an abstract image and true sharpness didn't matter).

Rather than try to constrain my exposures to times when he was relatively still, I just ignored his motion completely--in fact, I actually hoped he would move around or jiggle the rod to add to the abstract nature of my experiments. I ended up shooting several dozen exposures of him and another fisherman using exposure times ranging from 1.5 to 6 seconds, with the average being 3 seconds. The lens was almost wide open at f/4.5. As I watched the long exposures pop up on the LCD I began to love the shapes of the soft silhouettes against the very silvery and blue water. During the time I was shooting the fishermen (I shot several exposures of two guys together) would occasionally turn on red and blue LED headlamps (to find lures or bait, etc.) and I tried some exposure with those lights and they're interesting, but the light patterns were a bit distracting. (But those red LED headlamps were giving me some ideas for light painting that I'd love to try someday.)

Anyway, the whole experience became something of a visual ballet and the subjects had no idea they were being photographed. I would just waiting until they were in frame, try to focus at 200 or 300mm  in the darkness (it became a challenge as the moon rose higher and the backlighting was less intense) through a somewhat dirty windshield and hope that the length of the exposure and their natural movements would create a fun composition. Surprisingly, most of the frames are interesting and each of them is somewhat unique from the others--their motion, the motion of the waves, the intensity of the moonlight were constantly changing. And yes, I thought of getting out of the car and using the tripod anyway, just to steady the camera a bit, but I was afraid that if they saw me up on the seawall with a tripod it might inhibit their behavior or, worse, get them into a conversation with me--something that usually ends all creative photography. You can't talk to someone in a situation like this and photograph them at the same time. Interestingly, I grew up on this beach and surf casting was a part of my life for years, so I knew the motions and rhythms of the fisherman and could anticipate almost every movement they made.

I'm really happy that I tossed aside my usual obsession with sharpness and experimented using motion and moonlight to create abstract compositions. You can't plan a photo opportunity like this, you have to just watch the world around you and do whatever it takes to turn the moment into something visually different--even if everything that you're doing is technically wrong. Do click on the image to get a better feeling for the inherent motion of the shot.

Photo notes: Shot with a Nikon D90 with a 70-300mm f/5.6 Nikkor zoom; ISO 3200, handheld. Recorded in RAW. White balance was adjusted in the RAW conversion to a cooler color temperature to bring out the blue of the water. The image was sharpened slightly using the unsharp masking tool just to crisp up the water sparkle a bit. A minor amount of cloning was done in the lower right to remove the edge of a cooler on the beach.

Maximize Depth of Field for Ultimate Sharpness

There are really two kinds of sharpness in a photograph. One is the sharpness of your main subject, say, a person standing on the beach and that sharpness depends on how steady you were at holding the camera, the shutter speed you used, how carefully you focused on your subject and how still your subject was standing. If you are careful with your technique, your subject should be quite sharply focused.

The other is depth of field or "near-to-far" sharpness and that describes how much of the beach in front of and behind your subject is also in sharp focus. Depth of field sharpness is not an absolute thing that has exact starting and stopping points, rather it's a zone of what is called "acceptable" sharpness. Ultimately how sharp a photo appears also depends on where you're seeing it and how far away you are from the image. If you're looking at an online version it will often look sharper than it will in a print, largely because a print is made of paper and ink and has a surface that can interrupt our interpretation of sharpness. Also, images online are rear-illuminated so they will always look brighter and, within reason, sharper. And if you're looking at a print, the farther you are from the print, the sharper it will appear (particularly if you refuse to wear your reading glasses).

But you can maximize depth of field, that zone of acceptable sharpness, if you know what factors affect it. Basically three things (in combination) determine how much depth of field sharpness an image will have: lens focal length, your distance from the subject and the aperture you're using. Here are some things to keep in mind when you're trying to maximize depth of field:

• Wider lenses have inherently more depth of field. That means that for a given f/stop at a fixed lens-to-subject distance, the shorter the focal length of the lens, the more that will be in sharp focus. Wide-angle lenses provide the most depth of field and telephoto lenses the least.
• With any given lens, the smaller the aperture (f/16 as opposed to f/4, for example) the more depth of field you'll get.
• With any given lens at any given f/stop, the farther you are from your subject, the more depth of field you will have. If you were shooting a picture of a friend with a 28mm wide-angle lens at f/8, for example, your photo would have inherently more depth of field if you stood 10 feet away than if you stood five feet awy.

Remember, it's these three factors in combination that really determine depth of field. If you're photographing a landscape and want lots of near-to-far sharpness, choose a wide lens and a small aperture and you will increase depth of field. I shot this photo of Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale using a combination of a wide-angle lens and a very small (f/20) aperture to wring the maximum amount of sharpness from the image. Because you're usually using small aperture to get a lot of depth of field, you'll also be using relatively slow shutter speeds. In order to be able to shoot this photo at such a small aperture, I had to reduce the shutter speed to 1/30 second. You can see the motion blur caused by the slow shutter speed in the pick up truck. Using a tripod helps to steady the camera, but you'll still get blur with any moving subjects.

Of course, there will be times when you want to minimize depth of field--to limit sharpness in a portrait, for example, and to do that...you'll have to read the next tip!