Abstraction

Whilst in Sydney we visited the Opera House on a gloriously sunny and rather warm day.  I wanted to capture the magic of the sails but didn't want to take the standard tourist shot of the whole swan shaped visage (although I did take several of them)! I decided that I was best to try to take some abstract shots of the building and settled on this as being one of my favorites.

I shot this in aperture mode at f4.5 (to give only a small section of the roof in sharp focus) on my 18-55mm kit lens at 25mm.  Even with the ISO set to 100 due to how bright the day was I still needed a shutter speed of 1/1600ths of a second in order to not over-expose the image.  The image was taken using my EOS7D.

Post processing of the image has only seen the addition of my watermark.

I really like this image, the depth of field is suitably shallow, although the focal plane is about halfway through the image vertically at the bottom and so could maybe have been pulled a little to the right (it is not however vertical due to the pitch of the roof).  The focus in the distance is suitably soft without losing the structure of the building or the patterns in the roof.  Some people may say that the sun spots detract from the image but I think they convey the brightness of the day and add interest to what was otherwise a very flat blue sky., I could have used a graduated filter (if I'd carried one out with me) to reduce the over exposure to the top of the roof but I don't think it would have done much for the image so am happy to leave it as is.