This big old tree is about a mile from my house. I’ve been driving by it for over two years, thinking: I need to get a good photo of it.
You would think that I could just pull over by the side of the road, and take a photography, but it’s not that easy. (Although the wide lens of the iPhone would probably do it.)
It’s a very tall tree, as you can see, but there is a telephone pole (a pair of them, actually) that get in the way if you start to step back. So I need a very wide lens to be able to take a photo—I don’t want to tilt the camera and make the trees tilted; I wanted a clean shot. So I’ve been keeping an eye out for a lens that let me take this shot. I used a 35mm Schneider-Kreuznach Digitar lens at f/16, which did a number of things that made this shot possible with a ‘real’ camera:
35mm isn’t quite wide enough, but it’s as wide as I can afford since I retired. I was able to use a vertical shift to just get to the top of the tree. (That means I offset the lens from the optical axis of the camera, and used peripheral portions of the lens instead of dead center.) The ‘camera’ is actually a bellows with front and rear standards for the lens and the digital sensor. This is what was used a lot back in the early days of photography, but the technique is still in used by perfectionists like me who want exactly what we want in a photograph.
I shot this with my fanciest equipment, the Phase One digital back IQ4-150, to capture the detail that the Digitar lens collected. The IQ4 back has very small pixels, and I use it for landscape for that reason. I’ve included a 100% detail from the tree to show how much detail is in the shot.
I used techniques for capturing the wide range of brightness in clouds that I have been practicing for the last few weeks for this shot. Even so, the very brightest portions of the clouds were just out of reach. I am claiming that this was just a test shot; I plan to shoot the final version when I can get the sun in a better location later in the spring. In this shot, the sun is nearly behind the tree, and back lit clouds are really really bright.