Two to the Third

Sometimes, when I am out with people, talking about shooting landscapes, I talk about the light possibilities on partly-cloudy days. In today’s photo, you can see it is a partly cloudy day, which means the light changes every 5-10 minutes or so. Usually, it is so gradual, that it is hard to tell.

I find that most of my landscapes have three distinct areas. The foreground, the middle ground, and the background. If you think about it, each of these 3 places can have 2 lighting conditions: sun or shadow. So, you may have the middle in sun with the fore and back in shadow, or all three in shadow, or… you get the point. There are eight possibilities (two cubed). So, I run through in my head WHICH of those eight combinations I want. In this case, I wanted the combination where the foreground and the middle ground are well lit while the background was in shadow. So I had to wait about 15 minutes or so for this combination… [EDIT – thanks to commenters who corrected my math from three squared!]

Daily Photo – Sheep on the way to Paradise

This title makes it sounds a bit like they are about to be slaughtered… or maybe they are suicide-sheep, about to meet some sweet sweet virgin sheep in paradise. But no, this is not what I mean. There is a little town past Glenorchy, New Zealand called “Paradise”. I passed these sheep while on the way there.

I never made it to Paradise, truthfully. I turned around. It felt like such a long way to get here, and I had to turn around to get back to Queenstown before it got too late.

I took this photo with my new Nikon 28-300 lens. I love it so far! This one was shot at f/5.6, 70mm, and ISO 100.