Week 37 (September 10th - September 16th) | Picture 49

Darn it! So much for my 52 week blog. To those of you who are still around and reading, sorry about the abrupt absence. We had a very sudden death in our family and were out of town for a while. And if I'm being honest, I haven't picked my camera up much since then.

I'm going to try to get back into this. But I'm not feeling nearly as motivated as I should be . . .

Let's talk about Ryan Brenizer. I have a photography crush on him. Aside from the fact that he shoots Nikon AND takes some of the most beautiful wedding pictures I've ever seen, he also developed a method for achieving extraordinarily shallow DOF with a much wider field of view than you could ever get from a wide angle lens. Photography 101 (or cheat with a DOF calculator): longer focal lengths equal shallower DOF.

I happen to love wide angles for the perspective, but also love longer focal lengths for their beautiful compression - and Ryan Brenizer just happens to combine the 2 with the Brenizer Method that he talks about here.

Cool, huh?

Well I don't have any gorgeous couples to photograph, and God only knows my child won't cooperate, but I wanted to play.

We found this little nest on the ground after Hurricane Irene, and I wanted to get an up close shot of all the details, but also some background in the shot for more interesting composition, so I thought the Brenizer Method would be the perfect thing to try.

One shot.

Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 105mm f/2.8 macro
Aperture: f/4.0
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 400
Flash: none
Exposure: manual

Combined shots (9 images total - then cropped down significantly):


There is also a calculator that tells you what lens you would need to take the resulting shot. My final image could have been produced with 60mm lens shot at f/2.2. Considering I have the 50mm f/1.4 - it means that I could have produced this shot with that lens fairly easily (with a bit less compression), but it was a cool experiment to play with anyway.

Definitely check out Ryan's website. He does 40+ image composites resulting in amazing combinations of focal length and aperture!