Group f/1+

Back in the day, photographers like Ansel Adams were part of something called Group f/64.

Go ahead and read that if you’re not familiar. I’ll wait…;)

Now, dare I suggest I’m in that sort of company? No, certainly not. But one can have aspirations.

But “aspirations” also suggests similarity. Ansel Adams produced these amazing, long-view scenes — ones that boggle the imagination in their complexity, scope, even majesty.

That’s not the way my brain works. Inevitably, inexorably, I’m drawn to the detail.

Hence the tagline, “a slightly different focus.”

Part of detail, in that way my brain works, means isolating one or more elements from their surroundings — hopefully, without disrespecting those surroundings.

Short depth-of-field — f/1.4, 1.8, even 2.8 under the right circumstances — allows those surroundings to be more easily framed in interesting, even “different,” ways.

I took some photographs of a friend with his young son and the family’s dog yesterday. All in short depth-of-field.

And, it should be said, all using Nikon’s extraordinary D3, all with Nikon’s 50mm f/1.4D, all shot using RAW mode — which allows me to mess around with a huge number of details after the fact. Stuff like exposure, white balance, saturation, colors, and much, much more.

By the time a photograph is published here, it’s been at least through Apple’s Aperture and probably the by-now-ubiquitous Adobe Photoshop. All in search of the best “expression” of a given moment.

Like this one:

BG, Hero Shot

Here trying to celebrate not only the boy’s cute smile and great t-shirt but also the nanny’s hands, selflessly holding him up. (Done with help from Dad, making those new-parent-baby-noise sounds over my right shoulder.) In almost black-and-white, because it “felt” better than the full-color version.

But: these techniques are not without challenge. At f/1.4, the depth-of-field is so short, that it can be possible to have a photograph where you wish there were just a little more, well, there.

An example — of a “properly focused” shot:

BG – Eye

And a second one, where the focus was on his blossoming smile (arguably a “better” expression overall) — but one where the eyes are enough out of focus that the short depth-of-field is actually a disservice when printed at larger sizes:

BG – Smile

Almost requires they be viewed as a series — one of those two-photo-frame things at Michael’s or your local frame store, a couple of prints, and, well, memories.

But also something that, in terms of technique, could have been better. Something I’ll work on.

Maybe even with a little more from the imagination department, too. Stuff like…:

Wheeled Rover Approaches Boulder Test

Whether just stopping by for a quick shoot, hired for design, eating out*, wedding or event work, whatever — this is what you’re mostly going to get from me:

Group f/1+.

A “slightly different focus,” indeed. See the eight photographs in this series here.

Thanks for your consideration.

*Interestingly, several people in the past few days have commented on my food photography, something else I’ll be trying to make more of. So, in the spirit of the best depression-era slogans, “Will work for food!”