Likely My Most Beautiful Bad Photo Of The Year

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As noted yesterday my Monday photo outing was a lot of fun. I captured some landscape and nature photos that I’m proud to show and others that fell short. It is these botched photos of the day that I wanted to post and discuss this week.

Yesterday I posted The Good… a la the theme The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Today I wanted to post what I considered an example of The Bad.

Primitive Coastline photo by Jim M. Goldstein

If you’re like me you saw this and thought “Great! A really dramatic landscape that came out well”. The problem is that this is a low resolution version of a much larger and more detailed image. Not unlike on my camera LCD screen I thought this came out when seeing it. After I got home and saw the large file I spent the remainder of my evening beating myself up for taking this photo with the wrong setting. You can barely make it out, but the foreground is in soft focus. The rocks should have a very sharp edge and unfortunately they’re soft. Tired from a long day I mixed up my settings, not capturing the scene with a greater depth of field via a smaller aperture setting. The result is a soft focused image in the foreground and a well focused image in the background… all because I chose an aperture of f4 and set my focus manually to infinite. If I were to do it again I’d have set an aperture of f22 and manually focused on the rocks mid-scene. I have numerous images of a similar nature taken else where using the correct settings so I’m frustrated with my lack of focus and poor execution. In that regard this may very well be my most beautiful bad photo of the year.

Technorati Tags: California, coastline, coast, ocean, landscape, seascape

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Posted by Jim on 12.19.2007 at 1:57 am
Tagged: California, Landscape, Locations, Nature, Photography

http://www.comeacross.info Raoul

Noticed the soft corner as soon as I looked at the photo… Look at the bright side though. You’ll probably get another chance to get that photo right. Plus, with the 1Ds Mark III, you could have cropped the photo and still had enough resolution for a large print…
http://www.grafphoto.com/wordpress Mark

Can’t tell you how many times I have done the same thing Jim! And sometimes I do the f22 forgetting that it is doing to severely affect overall sharpness due to diffraction.
http://www.jmg-galleries.com Jim

@Raoul you know I could crop this, but I’d rather get it right. I’ll return to get this right no matter what camera I’m using

@Mark I was really embarrassed that I made such a simple mistake. A little distracted and a little tired… it happens from time to time. None the less I strive to be better than what this image reflects. My first reaction was to hide this image away and never look at it again, but after extracting my feelings from the experience/image I thought it would be worth while to discuss and perhaps it will enlighten others to something new.
Although its good to know that I’m not alone in this happening from time to time I still have to fight the urge to not kick myself.
http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/12/20/death-of-an-oak/ Landscape Photography and Nature Photography by Jim M. Goldstein – JMG-Galleries – Death of an Oak

[...] Another photo from my Monday photo outing. On the scale of good to bad of the photos I’ve highlighted so far (The Good, The Bad) this is the worst and as such is “the Ugly”. Photographed is a close up of a fallen Oak with fog shrouded living Oaks on a hillside in the distance. [...]