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A driftwood stump looms over a silvery sea under dramatic skys.  Fuji X-E2 XF 14mm at f/11 1/125 ISO 400

A driftwood stump looms over a silvery sea under dramatic skys.  Fuji X-E2 XF 14mm at f/11 1/125 ISO 400

Limitations

January 13, 2015

Limitations can push creativity.  I recently got a Fuji X-E2 and the only lens I have is a 14mm.  I have always been a slave to the zoom and I feel like I always feel as thought I am going to miss shots if I leave a certain focal range at home.  This means that I am often walking around with a lot of gear, and I still like the versatility that this gives me but the other day, with my new Fuji I found my creativity being pushed in interesting directions because I had some self-imposed limits.  The single prime lens became a stimulus to think about the photos that I would make in a different way and I came up with some interesting results.  In this image the sky was very dramatic and the stump provided a compelling foreground element.  With a 14mm lens you can get quite close and by stopping down the aperture to f/11 everything from one metre in front of me out to the horizon was in focus.  The light was really helping to make things dramatic and the dynamic range of this Fuji sensor did not let the front of the backlit stump lose detail in the blacks. Below I have included a little gallery of other images I got on and around this stump.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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In Landscape Tags Driftwood, Stump, Ocean, Water, Beach, Black & White
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2009-07-03 at 03-32-55 decay forest hiking juan de fuca log moss nature stump.jpg

Life

March 5, 2012

A clump of moss on a rotting stump on the Juan de Fuca Trail. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 at 85mm f/5.6 1/60 ISO 1600

This is a very old place. You can feel it in the give in the soil under your feet, in the still air that seems to breathe in the silences, in the trees that tower over you. Everything about this place speaks to the life that has struggled and lived and grown here for thousands of years. It is a cathedral without walls that honors the creative spirit and that breathed life into the dust.

Every time I hike the Juan de Fuca trail I watch out for and photograph interesting fungi. My daughter and I were hiking it a couple of years ago and we came across something I had never seen before, a fungus completely covered in moss. It was really quite beautiful. I opened up the lens to 5.6 mostly because the light was so dim under the rainforest canopy but it ended up giving me beautiful bokeh in the background. Bokeh is the term used to describe the soft out of focus circles in the background. The tone of the light is very soft and leaf filtered and I was happy with how those elements came together.

In Nature Tags Forest, Log, Stump, Juan de Fuca, Decay, Nature, Hiking, Moss
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We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

-Anais Nin

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