Behind the shot: Lonely - Mathias Joschika

Mathias Joschika

Behind the shot: Lonely

In this series I try to show you how I took some of my pictures in my portfolio. You will get to know the gear and settings I used, as well as a little back story of how and why the image was created.

Enough introduction - let's get it on!

Lonely
Gear
Settings
Body: Sony a7ii

Shutter Speed: 1/500
Lens: Sony 28-70mm F3.5-5.6

Aperture: 6.3
Flash: None
Focal Length: 70mm
Filter: None
ISO:
200

Sometimes you just have to be lucky and keep your eyes open.

After taking the shot "Foggy" I was heading back down. Quite some walking later I got back into the super thick fog and started to look for some interesting motives in the forest. I found a couple of promising scenes and tried to work out a composition which I liked.

The photos I took in the forest just did not work out the way I would have liked, so I went on to get back to the car. About ten minutes before I was back at the parking lot, I saw this lonely, crooked looking tree. Thanks to the thick fog, the light was diffused and especially the backlight of the tree was just marvellous.

Since I had my settings already at ISO 200 from the shots in the forest, I just left them there and took a test shot. I imagined a calm tree in my images, so I had to use a faster shutter speed because the branches of the tree were shaking due to the wind. I zoomed in and pressed the shutter. Nice!

When I imported the picture in Lightroom I saw some huuuuuge sensor dust spots. While changing lenses on the mountain top, some rather big particles took the opportunity and settled on my precious sensor. Fortunately, it was relatively easy to remove these spots in this image. After one click onto black and white and some contrast and clarity sliding: Tada - there was my envisioned image.