We had an unexpected day of rain the other day and I couldn’t bear to sit indoors. So I drove to an area that I had never been before but planned to explore. The light was really good that day but I didn’t expect to get anything significant from the endless juniper trees I drove by. Juniper trees have wonderfully expressive trunks but they really don’t rank with bristlecone pines and some of the upper elevation trees. I stopped now and again to examine some composition but nothing really stood out. I finally shot this one and liked how it filled the frame.
This is a focus stacked image but other than that virtually nothing was don’t in post processing. I chose one of the plainest of profiles. No matter how I tried to enhance it it made it worse. Saturating the colors. Adding contrast. This is about as straight photography as anything I’ve done recently.
Sometimes straightforward is all that is necessary. This is an understated look at a complex scene. The fragmented tree, clearly ancient, doesn’t shout its status. I’m left wondering if it is still alive or if the surrounding greenery are parts of others. A square crop might simplify this if it’s a direction you want to take. Junipers are difficult to shoot as I know from a few failed attempts.
Igor, I really like the serpentine flow of the trunk and the texture. I wonder about this image in B/W as there is not much color to work with. Also TME the RLC negative space is a bit distracting although it lokks like no option from the perspective you shot from.
Yeah that brings up a point I considered. We seem to be spending a lot of time removing any higher tones between branches where the light breaks through. I can see that in an abstract where it’s all about lines and shapes. But here I’m not trying to show just lines and textures. I want to show a clearly recognizable tree with all the branches and space around it. So I feel that the lighter areas are part of what I want to show. Mostly. There is a white area in almost dead center that doesn’t show anything. Just plain white. That one bothers me.
Not really. I don’t wish to make this an abstract design of branches. I want it to be recognizable as a tree. The green you see are it’s own branches that are meant to work as a visual frame.
Ah…then I think it’s important to leave it in color so it’s more recognizable. That the green is its own living needles is an even more powerful statement about the tree’s longevity and toughness.
If that is what this looks like on a rainy day, then the drought out west must be as bad as the news says it is. This looks parched. I think this image works much better in color than B&W, the subtle hints of color play off nicely against the midtone grays of the juniper trunks. The composition is nicely balanced too.
This is a fine intimate scene, and works well for me as presented. I have to stretch to come up with any meaningful suggestions. But given the nice subtle tones of red and orange in the trunks, I could see a very slight increase in the green saturation for bit more red/green color contrast. Doesn’t need much, just a hint more.
Junipers are interesting trees. That is quite a big one. The subtle colors work for me. How about a touch of dodging/burning to bring out more depth? I can see some shadows that define the shape of the trunk, but they’re faint. Here’s what I’m thinking.
Thank you for your suggestion. I have to be with this a bit. I actually dropped the colors and the contrast because it was a complex scene and wanted to simplify that. This is working in the opposite direction. But maybe I was wrong to think that. I have to think about this without preconceived thoughts.I’m not able to see the differences without posting them side by side and I get errors when doing so.
Oh great. The small versions of all 3 images got posted but you can’t click on them. I guess that was the error in the post. Well, now I can tell the difference even less.
I wish we had these trees here in Florida! The colors and texture in the wood are wonderful. I do love the composition! Perhaps you were in the mood to present this more realistically when you processed it, but it looks a bit flat to me. I played with it by selectively burning and dodging areas in the wood to try to give it a bit more depth. I also tried to increase saturation of the greens but had little to no success there. Just another viewpoint.
Thank you for all your comments. I still don’t know how I feel about this one and that’s not a good sign. Good images are usually obvious. Somehow I feel there is too much going on in this image. I still like it very much though. Perhaps it needs still more time.
