Silhouette

This is another photo from my walk to the top of the hill in the nature reserve a few days ago. I tried to take a mixture of both wide shots, and close ups. For the close ups, I tried to focus on teasels, using them as a silhouetted foreground against the dark sky. I tried a mixture of focusing on several, and single plants, but decided that single plants had the most impact.

I used an aperture of F16, as I wanted the entire image to be in focus, so each of the spines could be seen individually. This amount of detail makes the image much more dramatic, as it emphasises each part of the photo equally. I wanted to use a low ISO, so had to base the shutter speed around these two values. I wanted to under expose so, after some experimentation, I decided to use a shutter speed of 1/320.

I increased the contrast in Photoshop, as I wanted the range of tones in the clouds to be prominent; decreasing the brightness slightly aided this. I then sharpened the image, in order to pick out the patterns in the clouds and to make the spikes of the teasel more prominent.

Bex
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