Fast Forward - mini project

Fast Forward, originally uploaded by topfloor.

Photowalking usually stands for walking the streets of a city, snapping photos of subjects of your interest. This can be people, architecture, deails and wide shots.

On my second day in Brighton I choose to do a more focused photowalk by giving myself a mini project to follow . . .

Shooting low down with shallow depth of field and the focus pane very close to the camera, having the main subject clearly out of focus (blurred).

To do this I choose a 50 mm effective focal length with f/1.4 maximum aperture, using a 3-stop ND filter to be able to shoot wide open in the sunlight. Putting down the camera on the ground was easy. Usually I shot a focus stack (shooting burts while turning the focussing wheel on my lens) so I could later choose the best picture at the computer (the camera I used was a rangefinder, not a DSLR, so DoF preview was not an option).

This is one of my first shots. What I found out is that sometimes f/1.4 was resulting in a too thin layer of sharpness so I sometimes had to stop down the lens a little bit (f/1.8 or f/2.0).

Have fun if you try this out for yourself.