I’m headed home from two weeks in New Zealand, a beautiful country with very friendly people. The south island offers much for the landscape shooter, both ocean and big mountain scenes.
We spent one afternoon photographing the rainforest near Fox Glacier. The challenge in any rainforest is the busy background that often distracts the viewer from your subject. There are many ways to fix a busy background, from moving your camera position to using a shallow depth of field. Another option is using off camera flash and making the ambient light very dark to eliminate the background. I found a nice plant with cluttered branches and grass behind it, so I used flash to eliminate the problem. With my ISO set 200, I went to manual mode in my camera and set my shutter speed to 1/100 with an aperture of f5.3. These settings gave me a dark underexposed image and enough depth of field to get the plant sharp. The next step was adding flash. I used one SB900 off camera triggered by a SU800 commander. Since the leaves were translucent, I angled my flash to backlight the plant to get a nice effect.
We took a spectacular boat ride through Milford Sound. This coastal area has penguins, glaciated peaks and massive waterfalls to photograph. I decided to use my 45mm tilt shift lens to photograph many of the falls. This out of focus look adds an almost miniature look to this landscape.