Project365 - Location Scouting

Introduction

As I often do, I drove Pat to work today. This morning, I brought my camera, as I wanted to do some location scouting. To find decent vantage points for an outdoor shoot. These are the "test" shots that came out of this morning's foray. They are all hand-held shots, with no serious mind to anything but getting a sense of what challenges I will face on the real shoot.

The Photographs

While this looks like a panorama, I actually just cropped out a TON of extraneous head and foot room from the original. It gives the effect I wanted, without the huge nothingness above and below the subject.

I always love to look at the City skyline. Here, it's about 15km to the downtown core. But it gives the contrast of urban/suburban living. In the shoot, I must remember to shoot at f22, to stop the depth of field issue - the skyline is out of focus, whereas the houses aren't. This was shot at f4.

Here, we see the Natural Gas plant providing electricity to the City. I like the long plume of steam trailing into the distance. For the shoot, I'll want to use my wide-angle lens to capture as much as I can.

 

An airplane leaving YYC at 6:30AM. I've seen shoots with long streaks of light, or others where the airplanes are frozen in the sky. I definitely need my tripod to get these types of images nice and clear !

 

 

Lessons Learned

Planning is essential. For the scouting expedition, I simply grabbed my camera, with its trusty 24-105mm f4L IS - it's a great general-purpose lens. And I merely pulled over, dropped the truck window & took a few test shots. For the real shoot, I'll certainly bring my tripod, my wide-angle lens, and perhaps my telephoto lens. And I'll set up to take about 100 photos a scene, until it get the shots I want.