One photo a day challenge: Day 70.

For today’s daily photos I went to one of our local parks. I spend a lot of time creating photography at Eldridge Park in Elmira, New York.

Mostly what I do is photograph the local wildlife at the park. Today I wanted to shift gears and try to photograph the landscape there.

The main reason that I don’t photograph the landscapes there is because the park is in a fairly developed part of town. It is hard to take a photo that doesn’t include some more industrial looking structures. And if you can find good angles to eliminate the outlying industrial structures there is a lot of man made structures in the park itself.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the industrial aspects of the area or the man made structures of the park they just don’t really fit into my style of photography and what I like to photograph the most.

My Landscape Style

But I thought one style of landscape photography I have been developing might work well for me in this scenario.

Generally when creating landscape photography the goal is to have lots of depth of field so that the entire landscape is in focus. But, what I have been doing a lot of lately is creating landscape photography with a very shallow depth of field. I especially like taking landscape photographs where the main subject is very close to the foreground and in focus and the rest of the scene is out of focus.

I like this style of photography because it allows me to feature one specific aspect of landscapes that can be pretty busy, but still give the overall sense of what the entire landscape is.

In the photograph I am sharing here the main subject is the tree along the lakeshore. The tree trunk is in nice crisp focus. The rest of the scene is out of focus. But you can still make out the branches, the lake, and then the park buildings as your eyes move farther into the background of the photograph.

You can still get the overall feeling of the park atmosphere, but you clearly see what the focus of my photograph is.