Sean Beckett, who will teach a photography workshop at this year’s Northern Woodlands Conference, shared this image of Sterling Falls near Stowe, Vermont. Sean is the Staff Naturalist at North Branch Nature Center, and the photograph is one of a number he uses to explain how hydrological and geological processes contribute to different forest types.
Below is his description of the shot. For more of Sean’s work and upcoming photography classes, check out GreenMountainExposure.com. To review a full list of this year’s conference speakers, go here.
“The Green Mountains are built of beautiful, laminated metamorphic schists and phyllites, upon which all our hydrology and botany is draped. Mountain creeks often track and excavate the weaknesses between rock layers. And the flora growing at a site is often determined by the rock type found underneath. In this scene, I wanted to capture the interplay of these three layers of the landscape (geology, hydrology, and botany). I used long shutter speeds (about two seconds) to blur the water, and a very narrow aperture (f/22) to ensure that the close ferns and distant rocks would be equally sharp. This composition also required dangling over a precarious ledge, so instead I held the camera out on a closed, expanded tripod, and used a 10-second timer while watching the camera’s adjustable LCD screen to compose the image from a safe(r) distance from the edge.
Our eyes are much better than a camera at simultaneously resolving details in bright clouds and beneath dark rocks. To approximate the huge ‘dynamic range’ that the eye sees at a scene like this, I needed three images – one exposing for the details in the dark cove on the left, one for the bright, sunlit rocks, and one for the neutral ferns and ledges. In post-processing, I blended the three images together such that each area in the scene used the image that was best-exposed.
Some people feel that such manipulation is ‘cheating.’ For me, I attempt to render a final image that expresses what the eye actually sees, and the heart actually feels. Our capacity for sensory perception and emotional expression is much greater than that of our camera’s sensor.”