Closing in

There?s a piece of conventional wisdom amongst photographers that you should compose with your feet, not your zoom lens. However, having a zoom lens does give you the capabilities of several focal lengths in one housing. Picking a focal length before you shoot is a good way of forcing yourself into thinking about your composition. One of the nice things about the 18-270 is that I quite often have more range than I need, so I can choose freely without feeling too limited. I would love it if the zoom lock function of the lens could be applied at several different focal lengths, rather than just at 18mm, but you can?t have it all. Not yet, at any rate.

I chose 100mm as the focal length for this shot, to give just a very slight separation between the sumac in the foreground and the creeper on the wall, and a natural perspective. (Note that the shutter speed is well below the recommended 1/150s for this focal length on a cropped sensor body). A wider angle of view would have meant becoming road pizza, and a longer lens would have restricted how much of the foliage I could have included.

These are two of my favourite plants, and I love the way the colours contrast each other at this time of year.