Posts Tagged: street photography

Hieroglyph Sofa and Tree

The Fox, the Hair, and the Sofa, and the Xmas tree

The Fox, the Hair, and the Sofa,and the Xmas tree (click image to view large)

As we were returning to work from lunch, a co-worker asked if I had seen the hieroglyph couch. I said I hadn’t. She pointed down the block and across the street. I detoured over to take a look. This is about the fourth or fifth large piece of furniture left out on this four-block stretch of Shattuck over the last few months. But it’s the first to feature such fine inscriptions. The long-dead christmas tree was an added bonus.

Live and Learn Photography

Green House

Green House (click image to view large)

As you may remember, about this time last year I embarked on a project to photograph all, every inch, of Albany’s commercial streetscapes. Granted, this only amounts to two streets that intersect and are each about a mile long. It is not a big place, but that still amounts to a few hundred shots to get every linear inch of it all. And I didn’t finish all of it until July.

For this, I really wanted to go for a sharpness that I don’t often worry that much about. I did it all on a tripod with the sharpest lens I have, a 35mm prime. And–well, I’m going to out myself here as a basic idiot, but I’ll proceed anyway–I also thought I would stop down to get deep depth of field and the best sharpness I could. So I shot the whole thing at f/16. So, short of going really far, like using mirror-up mode to reduce vibration, I thought I was going to get the sharpest results possible with my current gear. But somehow,… the results weren’t really that great. The shots didn’t look as I imagined they would.

Today I may have discovered why. I happened across a discussion of techniques for sharpness on a photographer community site, and it turns out that while depth of field increases at smaller apertures, after about f/8 or f/11, diffraction creeps up and results in a general out-of-focus softness. This is something landscape photographers deal with in trying to balance deep depth of field with maximum sharpness. Needless to say, I won’t be reshooting the project. But I will be remembering the lesson for a long time.