After photographing the old abandoned boat, I continued walking down Water Street in Apalachicola. Shortly after finding the boat, I came across these well used, but colorful, fishing buoys hanging on some netting outside a small nautical and antique shop.
Once again, I was glad I had my 100-400mm lens with me. I had tried to photograph these buoys on a previous trip a couple of years ago, but the 24-105mm lens I used just didn’t have enough focal length for me to create the shot I wanted. But with my 100-400mm lens, I was able to zoom in to 153mm, which allowed me to eliminate some distracting open spaces on the left and right sides of the frame and fill the frame with the buoys.
Because I had chosen to forego carrying a tripod and handhold the camera as I walked around town, soft or blurry images were a major concern. To address this problem, I set the camera on shutter priority mode and Auto ISO. I then chose a shutter speed of 1/400 of a second, while the camera automatically set the aperture at f/5 and the ISO at 640.
Now, normally, I would not choose such a large aperture because, as a general rule, depth of field becomes more shallow as the aperture gets larger. This becomes more pronounced with longer focal lengths. And, for this image, complete depth of field was an absolute must.
However, depth of field is also affected by two other factors. First, if the buoys had been on the same plane of focus, they would have all been sharp no matter what aperture was used. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. The other factor is the distance from the camera to the subject. The farther the camera is from the subject the greater the depth of field will be. I was standing fifteen to twenty feet away, and this distance expanded the depth of field sufficiently enough to ensure all of the buoys were in sharp focus. Had any part of the picture not been sharp, it would have gone straight to the recycle bin.
Processing the file in Lightroom, I increased the overall exposure slightly, added contrast and adjusted the highlights and shadows. I adjusted the texture slider to further emphasize the roughness of the buoys. Finally, because it was the various colors that attracted my attention in the first place, I added a little bit of vibrance and saturation to really draw attention to the different buoy colors.
Once I was finished with the file in Lightroom, I realized there were still some distracting elements on the left edge of the frame. Opening the picture in Photoshop, I used the crop tool to crop out the distracting items. I could have done the work in Lightroom, but there are just some things I prefer to do in Photoshop, and cropping an image, when I need to do so, is one of those things. Once I was done, I saved this final photograph.