lichen

Moss and Lichen on the Forest Floor /  by Todd Henson

Moss and lichen on the forest floor

Photographing through a macro lens can affect how we see. We may begin to notice smaller details in the scene before us, and find that even when we get very close there’s still an incredibly rich expanse seemingly hidden within such a tiny sliver of space. Of course, capturing what we’re seeing and feeling is another matter entirely.

While hiking trails through the forest in early summer my eyes kept moving to the rich diversity of moss and lichen in various locations. So I picked out one with a mix of color and texture and set to finding a composition. I’ve always struggled with this sort of photograph. What is the subject? There’s so much going on, and yet it’s exactly that complexity that drew my attention. So I tried to include as much of the color and texture as I could. I don’t know what those rust-red things are but I love how they stand out amongst the various shades of green, because of both their color and shape.

Looking back on it now I see things I perhaps could have done better at the time. I’m a photographer who naturally leans towards creating images with shallow depth of field. But an image like this seems to benefit from great depth of field. I knew this so I intentionally stopped down the aperture to capture more of the scene in focus. In this case I used an aperture of f/25, which on a typical wide angle lens might have done the trick. But when you get very close to a subject with a macro lens it becomes increasingly difficult to get everything in focus even with the aperture stopped way down. Granted, with this lens I could have stopped down more, but I’m not sure if it would have been sufficient.

So, what could I have done to increase the depth of field to make everything in the photograph appear in focus? Possibly nothing directly in camera. But I could have used a technique called focus stacking where I create multiple images of the same scene in the field, adjusting the focus just a bit for each image until I’ve captured the entire depth of the scene. Then when I get home I import all the photos into Photoshop and stack them together. Photoshop works its magic, picking the sharpest parts of each image and combining them all into one final, hopefully fully focused image.

I’m still pleased with this image. It shows some of the diversity of tiny life in a forest, and how there’s often so much more there than we typically see. But I also like to analyze my efforts so I can learn and grow, both in techniques like focus stacking, and in the more artistic side of how best to compose such an image. I find the artistic side the most challenging, and one I’m still working on, so today I chose to talk about the more technical side.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, whether technical or artistic, I’d be happy to hear them in the comments below.

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Texture: Tree and Stone /  by Todd Henson

Exploring textures of tree and stone

What is it that draws our eye to a scene, that leads us to believe there may be the potential for a photograph? It can be any of an almost unlimited list of things, and we’re each different so that list might differ by person. But one item in many of those lists might be texture.

My father and I were hiking along a new trail in a familiar park, taking in the scenery that was new to us, enjoying this little bit of exploration. This particular trail was changing elevation more than some, and the trail was a bit narrow in places. Thankfully, we were almost completely alone. In fact, we only once ran into anyone else, and strangely enough we ran into each other from opposite directions but both decided we’d gone as far as we wanted for that day, so we all said hello and goodbye and turned around heading back the way we’d come.

At some point I’d noticed something out of the corner of my eye, just a little ways off the trail. It was a set of huge lichen encrusted boulders with a small tree growing right up against them. I can’t say exactly what it was that initially drew my eye to this, but when I saw the scene I knew it had potential, and I knew some of that potential involved the fascinating textures of the tree and stone.

I don’t know if this particular image realizes the potential of the scene, but it gives an idea of what I was seeing and thinking at the time. There was a large background boulder with lots of green moss or lichen growing all over it. Closer in was a boulder, also with some lichen, but the stone had a bluer cast to it. And finally, there was the tree growing against the boulder, as if hanging out with a friend. It was also covered in lichen.

Each of these elements has different textures, and yet there is some similarity as well. And I think that’s part of what drew my eye without me realizing it at first. I saw some patterns, and when looking closer I saw textures that melded into one another but also had their own unique characteristics. And I wanted to capture that.

I suppose I’d consider this a photographic sketch, similar to what I’d mentioned in a previous post about exploring a stretch of creek. Sketches are when I’m exploring a scene, when I know something’s there but maybe I’m not quite in the right mind yet to figure out exactly what that is. I will usually try to take a step back and photograph the larger area to give me more context when looking back at the images, but in this case I didn’t do that. I probably should have. But even so, this image is enough to push me to return to that part of the trail, to try to find this scene again, and to spend a little more time exploring its possibilities.

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