I have the rented 24-70 f2.8L for the weekend, so today I headed to Coggeshall Farm in Bristol with the Rhode Island Photo Safari Meetup Group. While I shot over 200 photos today, I wanted to pick one that was a bit on the creative side for the Photo a Day challenge. This one fit the bill.
Shooting in aperture preferred mode, I set the aperture to f2.8 to get the smallest depth of field possible. The goal in this shot was to have a narrow range of pickets in focus, centered closely around the post in the frame, and to leave the background trees out of focus. The field was extremely cluttered, so the depth of field would be important if there was any hope to keep the pickets as the central theme of the image. The shot did indeed come out as planned.
Post processing was primarily around color enhancement. The field was extremely drab and devoid of color, so I ran it through Topaz and manually adjusted the saturation and color depth. Back in Photoshop, several layer adjustments and a hue/saturation adjustment brought out the detail I wanted. I added a second hue adjustment that only enhanced the yellows, giving the field a nice color glow without damaging the color of the sky. A slight unsharp mask layer was added at 100% for a 1 pixel radius.
