What's Your Angle?

When you shoot with a telephoto lens, the angle of view is very narrow - something like six or seven degrees (out of 360 degrees). So even a slight move in an arc around the blooms you are attempting to film can dramatically change the background. There may be other considerations, but this is certainly one of the important ones. In this photo, I probably had my heart set on filming against that nice complimentary green in the background and over looked the blossoms that were so close they were just a blur. Throw it out! A slight move to the left may have allowed me to leave the blurred blossoms outside the frame, but it also looks like the green might have run out if I did that.

This nice cascade of blooms could have been filmed anywhere from a profile, by moving thirty degrees or so to the left, to full on, by moving forty-five degrees or so the the right. The background verges on being too much of a distraction in an otherwise nice shot.

Here is - at least to my way of thinking - a much nicer composition. The background is blurred and yet still recognizable and interesting with it's play of lights and darks. Everything flows at the same angle - the branch in the foreground and the shapes in the background - with the exception of that one counter point of blurred blooms at an equal, but opposite, angle. I like this image a lot.

Sometimes you just enjoy the colors so much, you don't think straight about the resulting images. It is kind of like being drunk. This is probably one of those images where I was so "drunk" on color that I wasn't making good decisions about composition.

It can be "wild" filming blossoms like this. Every photo presents problems of shapes and backgrounds and what to include and what to leave out and a host of other problems to be solved on the fly. I think maybe the best way to learn is just to shoot a lot and review the images later to see what worked and what didn't.

This is the last day I will be posting cherry blossom photos.  Tomorrow, something different...