You can drive half a day to reach peak autumn color and find the hillside carved up by a clear-cut, a power line, and a thicket of saplings. Pulling a clean, deliberate frame out of a compromised scene is a skill you’ll use far more often than you’ll stumble onto a perfect location.<\/p>\n
Adam Gibbs<\/a> wakes to unexpected snow at a high-elevation camp in British Columbia, with 10 to 20 cm (roughly 4 to 8 inches) forecast even lower down. Rather than packing up right away, he walks into a stand of aspen he’d scouted the day before. Snow on branches picks out fine detail and gives dark trees some definition against everything around them, though it can also make an already busy scene busier. The area has been logged at some point, so saplings crowd the base of the aspen and a clear line to any single tree might be hard to find. He also flags a depth of field problem: with a longer lens and a lot of trees in the foreground, keeping everything sharp could get difficult. When that spot doesn’t produce anything, he turns to a shrub with salmon pink tinges sitting in front of the aspen and has to decide whether it belongs in the frame at all or whether the background textures can carry the image alone.<\/p>\n Later that day, a side logging road delivers spectacular light and an awkward set of problems. The tops of the larch glow yellow and light green, but the bottoms of the trees sit in logged ground and a power line runs above them. Gibbs racks the Fujifilm GF 100-200mm f\/5.6 R LM OIS WR<\/a> out to 200mm and builds a frame around three or four larch trunks with autumn color glowing behind them. At that focal length, he has to focus stack to hold the scene together. It’s also windy, and he openly debates whether to include the treetops and clone out the lines later or whether the edit would make enough of a difference to bother. He’s candid about feeling rushed, too, since he prefers to park and explore on foot over driving around an unfamiliar area hunting for compositions.<\/p>\n Much of the accessible backcountry in British Columbia is reached by forest service roads built for logging, so clear-cuts, slash, and utility corridors are part of the terrain. That reality rewards treating the edge of your frame as an editing tool. A telephoto lets you choose exactly which small slice of a hillside survives, and a gap left by harvesting can become negative space that separates a band of color from the trunks behind it. Compression also stacks layers that look scattered to the eye into something graphic. The trade is depth of field: at long focal lengths and moderate distances, the zone of sharpness gets thin, which is why focus stacking shows up so often in this kind of work, and why wind becomes such a factor. The sensor in Fujifilm’s GFX bodies is about 44 x 33 mm, roughly a 0.79x crop relative to full frame, so a 500mm lens frames a scene about like a 400mm lens on a full frame camera. Adding a 1.4x converter pushes that to around a 550mm equivalent.<\/p>\n The next morning, at about -7\u00b0C (around 19\u00b0F), Gibbs drives a main logging road and finds that he’s already driven past most of the color, leaving only patches. He’s heading away from the sun, and he wishes he were going the other way, since backlit trees are usually what pull him in. Then he stops for a patch of autumn color, a gap, and tree trunks behind it, framed with the Fujifilm GF 500mm f\/5.6 R LM OIS WR<\/a>. He shoots at ISO 320, f\/11, and 1\/60 s, keeping the shutter speed up against the wind and noting that atmospheric haze and heat can also cut into sharpness. Even with the lens hood on, he picks up some flare because he’s shooting almost directly into the sun. He praises the 500mm for its sharpness with and without the Fujifilm GF 1.4X TC WR<\/a>, and he points out that the GFX lineup covers him from 20mm to 500mm plus the teleconverter, while longer focal lengths are much thinner on the ground for some other medium format systems such as Hasselblad.<\/p>\n His last stop, among the cottonwoods of Manning Park, is in the video above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can drive half a day to reach peak autumn color and find the hillside carved up by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-660809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}