Heat Haze Problems

The new version. Reshooting a “Small Houses” image for Glas. Sony A7III 100-400 lens at 337mm and f/10.

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to write about photography on the Isle of Skye. I’ve been having problems with heat haze.

I headed up to the east side of the island to re-shoot one of the images for the Small Houses chapter of Glas. It’s a super composition, with a small farmhouse nestling in a hillside with the huge crags of Storr looming above. The problem with the original version (below) is that, when printed as a double-page spread the fold cuts down the centre of the image and the house is uncomfortably close to that fold. I have tried cropping in but am losing too many pixels for the bit (60cmx30cm) print size of a dps in the book.

So the task was to shoot a different composition and get some more space between the house and the Old Man of Storr so that the layout would be more “relaxed”, with more space for the fold in the middle.

The old version of this scene that is a bit too tight for the fold when spread across two pages in Glas.

I picked a bit of a different composition this time, with the house to the right of the Old Man, bringing the mid-ground crag to the left of the house more into play. There are some pros and cons with the new composition - it is better for positioning the fold when spread across two pages, but it loses some of the expanse of the landscape being zoomed in that bit more.

However, that wasn’t the main problem. The resulting images were just not sharp at all. I couldn’t work out what was going on. I wondered if image stabilisation in the lens was messing things up. Or poor focus locking was causing issues. Then I remembered a day photographing the FIFA World Cup in Brazil when I just couldn’t get sharp images. It was a scorching day, and the temperature was causing a heat haze to form just above the pitch. This made any long-zoom shots of the far end of the pitch pretty much unusable as all sharpness was lost as the haze blurred everything beyond the halfway line.

With the level of zoom at 337mm on my 100-400 lens, and summer weather here in Skye, I was suffering from heat haze again. The video and close-up image below gives you a good idea of the situation.

A zoomed-in look at the final file, and the effects on sharpness of the house caused by the heat haze.

So that was that really. There was no point carrying on, despite the interesting patchy light and rather atmospheric clouds. There is simply nothing to do in this situation aside from coming back on another day.

While the final image is OK for “social media” use, when nobody ever really looks at anything that closely, it is nowhere near acceptable for printing two-feet across in a high-end photobook like Glas.

I like the new composition though. Positioning the house on the right allows the diagonal line of the Storr ridge to run down towards the house which is a nice element. Having the big crag in the middle distance closer to the house also adds to the “ominous” feeling of all this rock dominating, and the little house tucked into the hollow facing up to the huge weight of the landscape. The Storr cliffs are in shadow making them even more scary-looking, but the position of the sun to get this means no raking morning light as in the original shot. There is more room for the fold though, which was the original aim.

I’ll go back again when it is a bit cooler (I can’t believe I just wrote that) and have another go.