Washington Waterways
Love the rivers and streams in the spring: plenty of water makes for exciting views.
This is, pardon the pun, a watershed photo. I’m talking technically; never mind that the local watersheds are dealing with really heavy flows of water. This is Boise Creek, normally a mild trickle of water. Heavy rain has all the waterways churning and running fast.
The last time I visited the creek, the log that is causing the little waterfall was completely above the waterline. I hardly recognized it.
Winter in Seattle is as bleak as this looks: gray deadfall, pale grasses, moss (nearly) everywhere, and the water is stained dark brown by tannins (courtesy of the local forests).
Technical discussion: this image is a brand new way of working for me. I have a new toy: a bellows and rail that turns a 35mm digital camera into a view camera (those old-fashioned boxes-on-a-tripod with bellows).
That’s my camera on the right. For the waterfall image, I used a classic 4x5 camera lens, a Schneider Super Angulon 72mm f/5.6. It’s a design not far from another classic, the Zeiss Biogon. This is very special historical stuff, and I am extremely happy to get to play with it. :) Beneath the bellows are the moving parts, allowing tilt and rotation for the lens, and shifts up/down and left/right for the camera end.
It’s called the ACTUS, and it’s made by a Dutch company, Cambo. It’s extremely well made and a pleasure to use. It has tilts and shifts that are used to control which portions of the image are in focus, and I started training myself to use that stuff today. Hard to think through just by reading, so I got out in the field to try it and see what worked and what didn’t. I made my share of mistakes, but also caught some good shots, too.
This particular image is actually a set of nine images. The lens that is on the front of the setup was made for very large sheets of film, 4” by 5”. My camera has a sensor that is only 1” by 1.5”. Since I can slide things around, I slid the camera up and down and left to right to cover a good portion of the “image circle” of that lens. I then assembled the result in Affinity Photo, using the Panorama tool.
(One panel, bottom right, had no firm details in it, so the software couldn’t figure it. I manually added it and blended it to match.)
The water looks so smooth because this was a long exposure, about 2.5 seconds for each frame. This was intentional to get the effect you see. I had to shut down the lens aperture to f/64 (modern lenses don’t even go there) to get that long of an exposure. I liked the look of it, but really need to get a neutral density filter so the resulting images will be sharper. Here’s a good example of how sharp the lens is when not stopped down so far:
After this was posted, I combined some shorter (meaning wider aperture, and thus sharper) exposures into a panorama similar to the first one. Here is the result:
There’s a lot to juggle with this setup, and I am looking forward to getting more familiar with it.
Well that is an impressive amount of technical process to get that shot. I remember the bellows lens from early photography photos. My father taught me about f-stops when I was 12. I am shocked to hear that modern cameras do not go down to f-64. What is the world coming to.
Comparing the two shots I think they are both beautiful.The sharp focus photo is sharper than the human eye; my eye at least.