Mormon Row in Grand Teton National Park has several homesteads and classic barns that are popular spots for morning shots.
We left the coach before sunrise so that we could catch the first rays of light on the mountains. The mountain peaks catch early sunlight before the sun rises to the east. This is often called alpenglow but true alpenglow is not direct sunlight so it only happens when the atmospheric conditions are right. On this morning the glow on the mountain was direct sunlight but before the sun peaked out over the mountains to the east. These first rays of sunlight are a nice reddish-orange and worth getting up early for.
Perspective Control
It’s always interesting to see how photographers spread themselves around a scene like this. Many will choose a close up shot and set up right in front of the barn. They’re often there while it’s still dark to claim “their” spot. We’ve driven past this location on our way to a distant morning shoot and you can see their headlamps in the darkness as they get set up. Others will set up at a distance and zoom in on the scene which is what I did here. This got me to thinking about doing a post on perspective control and how various lenses affect your shot. The focal lengths mentioned below are for cameras with a full frame sensor. If you have a crop sensor camera divide the focal lengths listed by 1.5 for Nikon or 1.6 for Canon.
Longer lenses or telephotos tend to compress the scene and bring the distant background closer to the foreground or barns in this case. Since the mountains are massive compared to the barn this perspective emphasizes the size difference. The feeling this generates in the photograph is one of smallness of the farm compared to its surroundings. I chose this perspective because I wanted the scale of the mountains to come through in the image. The shot below left is from the same position as the featured image above and is at a focal length of 115mm. Not a big telephoto but enough to compress the image.
A few photographers set up about halfway between the distant viewpoint and the close up shot in front of the barn. Most of this group would be using a medium focal length of 50-70mm to capture this scene. This focal length tends to balance foreground and background elements somewhat the same way your eye sees the scene. Neither foreground or background is emphasized and the eye tends to evaluate the whole scene looking for the intended subject. The center image below is from this perspective.
For the photographers that set up in front of the barn, most were using a wide angle lens to get the whole scene into the frame. These would be focal lengths of 16-40mm. Wide angle lenses tend to emphasize the foreground by making it appear large relative to the background. Here the foreground would be the subject. Hopefully that’s the photographers intent. The image on the right is from this final perspective. You can see how the mountains are diminished relative to the barn.
Image Notes
I tried to keep the width of the foreground the same in all three perspectives. The width of the background changes dramatically as you can see in the mountain range. It’s important to say that none of these perspectives is right or wrong. For a scene like this however, it’s up to the photographer to select what perspective will convey their intent. Using different focal lengths is a powerful way to control the mood of the image and should be selected with care. As you can see above, these are three very different photographs of the same scene. They were all taken within a 45 minute window to keep the lighting the same and they were all minimally post processed. I didn’t even remove the people as I did in the featured image up top.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully this sheds some light (pun intended) on perspective control and focal lengths. Mastering this technique will add an important tool in your arsenal and give you a lot of control over your photographs . Practice will help you be able to visualize what lens you need before you take the shot. This can be important because morning glow like above only lasts a short time and you don’t want to be running around trying to figure out where to stand to get the shot you want.
