Cemetery for Military Working Dogs, Fort Irwin California
This cemetery for military working dogs is at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin California. Something about this place touched my heart. It was good to see the dogs that serve our country remembered in this way. The crosses indicate the dog’s name and the month and year the dog died.
I composed the scene in several ways using different camera angles and points of view. I particularly liked this point of view looking west between the two rows of crosses with the mountains of the Mojave Desert in the background. I tried shooting over the fence but preferred having the camera low and shooting through the fence. Getting inside the fence to enter the cemetery is prohibited.
I chose a focal length of 24 mm, a lens aperture of f/16, and focused at the hyperfocal distance to maximize the near to far depth of field, giving me sharpness from the closest cross to the distant mountains. It was a bright, sunny day so I used basic daylight exposure (BDE) instead of using the camera meter.
On a bright sunny day with the sun behind you and relatively high in the sky, you can use BDE and not even bother with using the camera’s meter. The sun is a light source with a constant light intensity (unless it is low in the sky and the earth’s atmosphere reduces the intensity of the sunlight). Simply put, with the sun behind you on a bright sunny day, BDE is a lens aperture of f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/ISO. If the ISO is 100, the shutter speed is 1/100. If the ISO is 200, the shutter speed is 1/200, and so on.
Photo Data: Canon 5D Mark III. Canon EF 24-105L lens at 24 mm. 1/100, f/16, ISO 100.
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