Worth the Wait and Work

This year, fall in the Chicagoland area could hardly be called fall. We wore shorts on 80-degree stretches, and it felt more like an elongated extension of summer. I was looking forward to fall this year, mostly interested in the leaves changing colors, but even that felt delayed.

Every day, I stared at the leaves on the trees during my commute. They were still as green and lush as ever. It was like this for weeks on end, and I was close to giving up, and I eventually stopped looking completely.

One, I walked out and the air was brisker than it had been all month. A breeze sent a shiver down my spine, but the sun's warmth did its best to cancel it out. As if a switched had been toggled, the foliage bore more color than they had in the past weeks. Pops of warm yellow and sprinkles of bright red adorned the trees. It was the perfect day to shoot.

The RhinoCam Vertex system has been a recent favorite of mine lately. It's a good way to slow down to make more deliberate creative decisions. It seemed like the perfect way to admire the autumn colors while still making images, especially since I need patience and precision when taking the four pictures required for a stitch. I wanted to break out of my habit of shooting wide and chose to take our Bronica SQ 200mm f/4.5 for a spin.

To adapt the Bronica SQ lens to my X-T200, I would use two adapters to fill the gap, since we don't have a dedicated Broinca SQ to Fujifilm X RhinoCam Vertex. EF-FX-RCV would act as our Rhinocam Vertex adapter. Instead of a standard adapter for the EF-SQ part (it was out of stock anyway), I opted for the TLT ROKR version. The extra movements of the TLT ROKR provide a little flexibility, but I can also use it in the neutral position in lieu of a standard adapter.

Images

In the spirit of Halloween, here's a horror story plenty of stitch photographers can resonate with:

For a perfectly-still subject, alignment issues are seldom an issue, unless the camera or tripod get bumped. Both our 4x5 adapters and RhinoCam maintain and even plane, so they truly operate as a means to move the camera sensor around the capture area. When I was making images, the breeze sure felt nice, but it did blow some branches just enough to affect alignment.

Even if the initial Photomerge automation doesn't do the trick, hope is not lost. With the unaligned layer, I can lower the opacity and reposition it as I see fit using distinct parts of the image. The Auto-Blend Layers did the rest of the work:

While 200mm is not a lens most people associate with shallow depth of field, having an f/2.8 or higher aperture, the focal length does allow for pretty good background separation. Here are a few examples of the kind of depth the 200mm lens can achieve.

For that last shot of the three trees, the background separation is nice, but to me, it doesn't work with the composition. Using the tilt function from the TLT ROKR adapter, I'm able to put all three trees are in focus.

Final Thoughts

Different seasons have their own highlights. Winter has the dreamy, serene snow-covered scenes. Nature looks beautiful and lush during the spring and summer. With autumn, the tree transform and give us warm tones that contrast the cool air.

Whenever I miss a chance to capture the seasonal scenery, I always tell myself, “there's always next year.” But if I learned anything this season, it's absolutely worth it to go out and take pictures. It can be nice to take a short break from life and enjoy the nature around you.