Pine Street Woods

Foggy May Morning Pine Street Woods

Doug Morse

— 4 min read
Foggy May Morning Pine Street Woods

Mollie and I stepped outside the other morning to a foggy neighborhood. We were heading up to Pine Street Woods (PSW) and so I grabbed my camera excited that there might be some nice fog on the hill.

The trails at PSW are all named with little pictures or icons. We parked at the lower lot and I decided we would walk Mushroom which switchbacks up the west side of the hill. Then Pinecone to Momentum then on to Meadow back to the upper lot and then back down Sled to the lower lot.

I am still using my digital Fuji GFX 50s ii with the Tamron 70mm-210mm f4 zoom lens on an Olympus mount. I am trying out-of-camera images using a film preset of the Fuji Eterna motion picture film simulation. This is a departure from my earlier idea of taking a film-like approach and using a rather ‘flat’ simulation as the basis for treatment in post. This new method saves time and I still have the RAW if I manage to capture a truly special image that I want to work on more in post.

Images taken under these conditions render with low contrast and a softness of color and focus. Most of this is due to the atmospheric conditions but early morning light is limited and so handheld shots have wider apertures with a softer overall focus and shallow depth of field. All of this contributes to the quiet soft mood. (There are more technical comments after the photos below for those interested.)

A single tree trunk divides the image a reveals more on each side.
A Pileated Woodpecker bore mortises into this cedar tree in search of insects.
Delicate cedar fronds.
Flowers set against the warm colors of the ponderosa pine tree.
A small rock garden forms around glacier smoothed granite.
A small pine becomes a natural bonsai as it takes root in a shallow rock shelf.
Twin ponderosa pines
Dew collects small leaves on the forest floor.
Twisted remains of a cedar colored with moss and lichen.
Small plants populate the granite mounds.
In densely forested areas small openings in the canopy allow tiny fern gardens to prosper.
Ferns flourish where legacy paper birch perished as the conifers outpaced their growth, crowded out the sunlight, eventually the birch perished.

I have adopted a new means of dealing with zoom lenses like the Tamron 70-210mm on the Fuji GFX. The Fuji GFX 50s ii has In-Body Image Stabilization (IBIS) which is a real blessing with manual lenses. You merely tell the camera the focal length and it does a superb job of stabilizing the image meaning I can work at slower shutter speeds for handheld work. Of course a zoom lens has an infinite number of focal lengths between the long and short ends of its range. This means you with have to compromise by setting a halfway point or do like I do and set two focal lengths one at the short end and the other at the long end.

This works for me as I seem to find myself at either end of the range and the IBIS works reasonably well some distance from the end of the focal length setting. The trouble is I have to dive into the menus to make the switch.

My new fix is to use two of the custom settings which are essentially identical. In one I default to the short end of the range (70mm in this case) and the long end in the other (210mm). Now I merely switch between the two as I work the lens from long to short focal lengths.

Some experimenting might indicate a better compromise for the long and short focal length might be found just short of either end (say 90mm and 190mm. I suspect that you are better served setting the long end exactly to the actual focal length of the lens and compromising on the short end as shorter focal lengths are more forgiving for handheld shots. One could extend this idea to a third custom setting to use as a halfway point to better optimize the stability.

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