Zion's National Park

What the heck, here are a couple more from a recent trip to Zion's National Park.  Pretty standard images... except their mine... so I like them better than the ones in the calendars.   

Feel free to comment.  I hope you enjoy them.

Travis

No HDR.  Thanks.

We didn't get to go to the Emerald Pools, unfortunately.  I am trying to put together a trip with some friends because my wife won't hike with me to see any of the really cool stuff.

Soon, my son will be big enough to go with me though, so eventually I'll go see the pools and Angel's Landing, as well as the end of the Narrows and several areas on the Kolob.

As for my aperture... no real reason.  I had sufficient depth of field with f/11 and a 24mm focal length, and f/16 makes the viewfinder so dark with DOF preview that I seem to miss my focus on foreground items anyway.  I tend to try and stay as near to f/8 as possible, as that seems to be the most typical 'sweet spot' of all my lenses also, so it's just somewhat of a habitual tendency of mine.  I hadn't really thought of this while shooting however, I just know that these things have been concerns of mine in the past and so they may be developing into some of my personal practices.  Just FYI, for portraiture I typically try to stay around f/5.6-f/8.  Once upon a time, I thought using the smallest aperture possible on any given lens was the best way to shoot landscapes; but that never made a huge difference on most of my images.  If I ever get into large format shooting like the big boys do, I'll definitely be more concerned about this, but with the small format of most digital sensors, DOF just isn't as difficult to obtain, and so sharpness at the lens's best possible setting is what I think should be the goal.

Now, take all this with a grain of salt... these are just thoughts of mine that seem to be working for me (and we all know I'm nuts) .  Feel free to try it out for yourself and experiment, of course, but I realize that it may not be the 'photographer's standard practice' for this type of image.

Good luck and thanks for your comments,
Travis

I think it's probably safe to say that most photographer's don't.  I'm just mistake-prone and without it, I get a lot of blurry foregrounds.  I've heard a lot of 'tricks', and some of them work some of the time, and I use them, but usually if there is something within 5-15 ft of my lens that I want in the foreground of my image, I will almost always check with the preview to ensure it's in focus.  Using these images as examples: the second one I would not have worried about it because those tree tops are easily 150 feet away; but in the first one I most certainly did check my DOF because I would have kicked myself for getting home to find out that the fence got blurry as it got closer.  It's a powerful line in the composition and having it soft would have reduced the impact it has on the viewer.  Wouldn't you agree?  The overhanging tree branches are the same... if they are blurry then they are simply a distraction and will no longer provide any means of visual framing.

Canon too

ooooh!  Whats that app called???

Im an iphone app nerd. yes I am.