"Dancing In The Sunset"

"Dancing In The Sunset"
© David A. Ziser

I really enjoy this image.  I made it several years ago in my migration to digital photography.  I had always been a medium format Hasselblad shooter and loved to use wide angle lenses.  After switching to digital shooting, things changed. 

First of all, I was shooting in a rectangular format which was a bit uncomfortable for me since I had been shooting square format for over 20 years.  But, you know, you get used to it.

My biggest problem was finding wide angle and lenses like I had in my Hasselblad gear bag. I eventually purchased my first fisheye lens, a Nikkor 16mm lens – a great piece of glass.  The only problem was that it didn’t work as well on my APS sized Nikon D1x, or so I thought.

The more I played with the lens/camera combo I began to really like the less distorted super wide angle almost fisheye effect.  Now let’s fast forward to June 2010 – Lightroom 3 is released.  I fell in love with this program, especially the lens correction feature.  Now I could take those early fisheye images and transform them into rectilinearly corrected super wide angle images – way cool.

That’s what I did in today’s photograph.  This image was originally taken with a fisheye lens.  But after a little Lightroom 3 magic, I was able to remove the spherical distortion and the converging vertical lines giving me a very cool wide angle bridal image.

Lighting was from camera left, my Quantum on 1/2 power.  I adjusted the shutter speed to under expose the sky slightly for this very dramatic image of my bride.

Camera specs: Nikon D1x fitted with Nikkor 16mm fisheye lens, F5.6 @ 1/500 second, ISO 400.  Enjoy!  -David

p.s. Want to see the original image?  Hit the “Read More…” link below.

Here’s what the original image looked like. Pretty cool don’t you think? –David