Shooting data: Canon EOS 500D, Sigma 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC HSM, 1/30 f/4.5, iso 400, handheld. Rivergaro, Italy. Sometimes, the photo equipment itself can be an interesting compositional element. For my work, I often take photos of cameras and lenses, as illustration for the articles published on JuzaPhoto. But in some situations, the camera or the photographer can become the key for an artistic and unusual photo. A couple of days ago, I was taking photos at few kilometers from home: there was a beautiful sunset and the clouds in the sky had a gradient of color from red to deep blue...a good opportunitie for nice landscape photos, but I wanted something... more creative!
I had with me the Sigma 8-16 mounted on the old Canon 500D, and the 24-105 on my 7D. When you need a creativity boost, looking at the world through the 8mm is a great idea - its extreme angle of view becomes even more amazing when you have something in the foreground. In my classic landscapes I stop down to f/8 or f/11 to get everything in focus, but in this case I preferred to shoot wide open, to create some separation between the camera and the landscape into background. I focused selectively on the 24-105 lens; both the camera and the landscape are out of focus, but they are still recognizable shapes, so the photo works in spite of the small area in focus.
There are two things, in my opinion, that really make the difference in this photo: perspective and light. The 8mm perspective, combined with the selective focus, gives you the impression to be right there, behind the camera. The light was perfect: it created a beautiful combination of cold and warm tones that reflect in the water and on the camera. During post processing I have used the layer mask to make selective adjustments of brightness and color, I applied a gentle noise reduction and a bit of "Orton effect" (Duplicate Layer ---> apply a very strong contrast to the duplicate ---> apply Gaussian Blur with radius 20 ---> set the opacity of the duplicate to about 10% and merge the layers).
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