Looking Up

When I’m out and about with a camera, I try to remember to look up. Familiar settings that I’ve photographed again and again sometimes appear fresh with a simple change of perspective.

That happened to me last week as I wandered around town with my Canon EOS R8 on a nice sunny late afternoon.

There was something about the combination of the window, the brick wall, and the trees reaching over the building that caught my eye.

That afternoon, I had my camera set to monochrome mode. Since I shoot raw, I always have the option to see how a composition appears in color when I’m back at my computer. In this case, the color version is nowhere near as good as the original black and white one. The brick wall, which is actually painted grey, combined with the green of the sprouting springtime tree leaves and the blue sky overhead make this composition feel disjointed.

With the intention of achieving a softer appearance, I used program shift after metering to open my aperture to f/2.8 and letting the camera compensate by choosing a faster shutter speed. Program shift is a convenient way to get the benefits of aperture or shutter priority modes without having to switch out of program mode. I confess that I sometimes forget that feature exists, although this time I managed to remember.

The camera’s autofocus grabbed hold of the lower right side of the window frame, which is exactly what I wanted it to do.