One Shot #4 | Boots

I guess I’m on a footwear kick?

This morning while I was still in bed, the Spousal Unit came in to tell me that a red fox had been walking on our frozen lake, but the dogs scared it away. If I’d had a chance to photograph it, I probably would have had to break my Lenten resolution.

I walked around outside for a bit, but didn’t find any appealing subjects. We’re in a spring thaw, and everything’s brown and soggy and muddy. But when I was in the garage, I saw the Spousal Unit’s new boots, which she’d treated with waterproofing spray and left to dry on top of the tractor. Something about the clean boots and brightly colored newspaper advertisements caught my attention.

I wanted to shoot them with the Pentax FA 100mm f/2.8 Macro, to better isolate them from the background, but there wasn’t enough room to set up the camera far enough away. So the FA 50mm f/1.4 got some more work. I set up on a tripod and focused manually on the boot labels using Live View. Because I was working so close, I shot at f/5.6 to make sure I had enough depth-of-field for the newspaper. I probably could have backed off to f/4 or f/3.5 and been fine, though. (I have trouble judging absolute sharpness in Live View. The boot labels are blisteringly sharp in the photo, as they should be with this lens at f/5.6, but they didn’t look that sharp in Live View. That contributed to my conservative choice of aperture.)

Processing was pretty straightforward in Lightroom, though I did brush on some local adjustments to tame the brightest parts of the newspaper and boots.