Get creative when the standard won’t work

Its not the first time I have been to this location and it is one of my favorites in the Palouse. Landscape photography can present challenges and fun when not all of the desirable elements present themselves that could make taking the photograph just a second thought in telling the story. I visited this same church last September and had a completely different experience. The one thing that was missing was clouds!

This church siting on top of a knoll in a field with pretty amazing landscapes. Unfortunately, for me if you wanted to show those amazing landscapes and tell the scene about the church, it would be difficult to to without putting the sky in the picture. To put it in simple terms said many times by my mentor, “bald skies suck.” So what can you do in that instance? The foreground field in front of the church was OK but what could make shooting this church more fun? And as a bonus, pull a lens out of my bag that is fun to use but doesn’t always lend itself to landscape photography? The fisheye is a fun lens that does have practical implications (it was originally designed for use by the oil and gas industry), but can also be a tool to make your photographs interesting in different.

By walking right up to the church and using the Nikon D850 along with the Nikkor Fisheye 16mm 2.8, I could include the surrounding landscape int he photograph, but also islolate the more undesirable sky at the same time. By aligning the subject along the center of the plane in in my viewfinder, I minimized the induced curve by the Fish but included as much of the surrounding area as possible.