My wife packed my camera when she took the boys to have lunch with me at the park earlier this week. The boys enjoyed themselves but the weather continually threatened rain with intermittent sprinkles until it finally opened up just as we were leaving. This left little time for pictures, but I tried to squeeze one in anyway:
I hadn’t been to Crystal Lake Park in a while and had forgotten about this bridge. The “No Fishing On Bridge” sign begged for a wide-angle treatment, emphasizing the sign and exaggerating the depth of the bridge. If you want to use a wide-angle lens to “get it all in,” you’re going to wind up with the subject too small in the middle, surrounded by a bunch of irrelevant cruft on the border; push in close and you get all kinds of wonderful swooping and converging lines. Exaggerated depth and environmental portraiture are the two best uses of wide-angle lenses.
This image also illustrates the dynamic range available in D90 RAW files and the abilities of Lightroom 4 to remap that dynamic range. The base image has murky shadows and large areas of apparently blown sky, but the highlights were recoverable and the shadows could be boosted without noticeable problems. No HDR needed for a tonally rich image.
Nicholas Haggin Photography 