Broken Window

This is an image of a broken side window on an old car that I found in a (private) junkyard in St. Clair County, AL. I went back to visit the same yard a bit later and got chased. So don't bother trying to find it. Pity.

(Click on the photo to view a full-screen version of the image)

There are few things that attract me more than rust, broken glass, and peeling paint do. Ask any of my poor students : ) -- they've been out on the field trips and seen the look in my eyes when I find a "new" dilapidated old car or building. The thing is, there's so much you can do with that kind of scene, from macro to landscapes, to using them as backdrops for people pictures. And I like to shoot attractive people in front of these junkyards or decaying buildings -- it's so easy to make a girl look good in front of a falling-down house or an old rust bucket of a car.

A big consideration on setting this shot up was parallelism: I had to work to get the camera back parallel with the glass, so that the plane of sharp focus would extend from top to bottom and from left to right on the glass. If the camera had not been absolutely parallel to the broken window, there would have been a streak or a line of sharp focus and then a great deal of fuzziness.

Note the lighting, though. Photography is all about lighting, at least good photography is... When you see subject matter that strikes you as having the potential for a great shot, one of the first things to evaluate is the light. The best subject -- with the best equipment, technique, composition, and exposure -- can always be brought to nothing with bad lighting. So the challenge is to place the right subject in the most advantageous light, and then exploy all the bells and whistles: lenses, settings, composition...and you'll be hard-pressed to make a mess of the lighting and successfully "fix it in Photoshop." get it right while in the taking moment, please. So part of the reason for this shot's success was timing: waiting until the light was illuminating the glass, but not the interior of the car that housed the window. So I found the window, framed the shot, and then found the lighting to be less than optimal. So I went off to shoot other pictures for some while as I waited for the sun to get in the right position to light the shot the way I wanted. When the light was right, I came back to the spot, set up the shot and took it.

This shot was taken with my Nikon D300 camera mounted on a tripod and a Nikkor 200mm F/4 Micro (macro) lens. Tremendous lens, incidentally, if a bit long in the tooth. (The lens is the older AF-D variety, and sports the godawful AF-MF slider contraption [mine has already been repaired once, and probably needs it again soon.] ) And of course this lens dates back to pre-VR days, so it should always be shot off a tripod to ensure sharpness. Yet and though, the 200 micro-Nikkor allows fantastic working distance, and it is just SO sharp that you could shave with it. But for me its primary reason for existing in my kit is that the long focal length compresses the foreground and background to such a degree that depth-of-field in focus is extremely shallow, which serves to isolate the subject. And see how it works on this shot? No intrusion at all from any potentially distracting elements. And this shot was taken at F/8! The smaller aperture was to maximize sharpness (most lenses achieve their greatest sharpness around F/8 - F/11.)