Hi this is Joe McNally for Adorama TV and in this segment I’m gonna talk to you
about
purposeful distortion.
Adorama TV presents Photo on the Go with Joe McNally.
I'm known as a people photographer.
Not so much a landscape guy and I'm also known as a lighting photographer so I put
my lighting expertise, such as it is, to play in the field
for a tree. Okay as you can see over my shoulder
this scraggly sorta interesting shaped tree.
Alright and out west you know
kinda interesting. I mean the shape actually inspired by use of lens.
I used for this a 16mm fisheye.
You notice the front element of the lens is curved. That means
pretty much your pictures are going to be curved. This is a lens that
when you pull it out at the bag put it on the camera
you know you're going to get distortion and so that is part and parcel
of your destination, of your mission. You know that distortion will hopefully
work for you in this particular instance.
I almost never use this lens vertically either but
breaking my own rules, if you will, it's a vertical picture.
Looking straight up at the sky emphasizing the distortion by taking a
low angle
and looking up at my subject vertically with a curved
type of a lens. Lots of rules that you would say
wow, you know be careful your way outside of normal photographic
convention here,
but I like the photograph the shape of the tree kinda matches the distortion of the
lens.
Hi Joe McNally here for Adorama
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So low
wide-angle lens, extreme wide angle lens
looking up at this tree. The tree has this weird shape right it’s got all its
branches and
stuff over here and then the whole tree has this kind almost S curve type of
thing coming down here.
Okay so I'm low looking up, there's my lens element okay. I'm lying on the
ground okay,
and I'm using a speedlight to where
up at the tree this way and its warped.
The reason I chose a warm gel for this particular Speedlite is, look at the
clouds.
Very late in the day they're getting dark and blue
and cool. So a warm tone is going to resonate well
against a blue tone in the background. The eye enjoys that, basic color wheel
theory. So I have a full kind of CTO on my speed light which is down on the ground being
hidden by rocks
over here and it's flaring up at the tree this way
illuminating just one side of it and then the rest of the exposure is all the
sky
up in here. So I'm firing a commander flash I was lucky
from this instance because I can't see my flash I still had
a little bit of splash from the commander or master flash
and it picked up the remote sensor on my TTL Speedlite
and I was able to get transmission from this to this
and hence the light on the tree.
So in this instance some photographic
rules being observed. Okay
the color tonality warm and blue.
Okay getting low making something look big and looming.
There's also some photographic conventions being broken I'm using a
very distorted lens vertically
I'm letting the tree take on this weird shape that the lens is helping out with.
I am also saturating the scene. I really want powerful color out of this, so my
exposures 250 at f/8 and ISO 200. So I'm really saturating the sky and the clouds
in the background
and also popping a dramatic light on the tree. So a lot of stuff
at play here as there are with any photograph that you approach. Your
observing rules of composition.
Okay lens placement, exposure, color,
the list goes on. So lots of different things combining
in this simple photograph of a tree which is a pretty unusual subject for me.
This is Joe McNally for Adorama TV
and we talked to you about purposeful distortion
in this particular segment.
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