GARDEN 50 – EARLY MORNING GARDEN: OUR HAZEL, SUNSTRUCK AND DEFOCUSED

 

 

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Looking through our hazel towards the rising sun, with an f1.4 lens wide open and defocused; 10 July 2014.

I bought a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor lens sometime back, meaning to use it in some really low light situations, but have used it hardly at all.  Reasons?  Well, I haven’t been in any really low light situations (does that get me off the hook?! 🙂 ).  And, also, 50mm, being not too far from the visual angle of the human eye, is just not a lens length I use much – I’m usually way above it in telephoto or way below it with wide angles.  The D800 is a full (i.e. 35mm) frame camera, but it allows use of just a part of that full frame in what Nikon calls DX format, which magnifies lens focal length by 1.5.  So using the 50mm on the D800 in DX format produces a (1.5×50) = 75mm lens, which still retains the very handy f1.4 aperture.

And a few days back I spent some time in our wonderfully warm garden with this 75mm f1.4 lens, and two pictures from this session have already appeared – they are here and here.

I didn’t use the f1.4 aperture and its limited depth of focus for these two earlier shots, but for the one above I did – and then I pointed the lens into the sunstruck tree and manually defocused it – throwing the focus out so that all of the translucent detail became very soft and glowing.

What can be seen in this now abstract image?  Dark lines cutting softly through the glow are three of the hazel’s many slim and straight trunks.  And the glowing orbs are the tree’s leaves, lit up by the low angle sunlight – and looking very like fairy lights.  The dark trunks channel my eye down towards lower right as they converge, whereas the fairy lights, being brighter over towards the left,  draw my eye over there, too.

D800 with 50mm Nikkor used in DX format at 75mm; 100 ISO.
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