I was hiking to a waterfall in the evening when I noticed the light and the textures of this scene. An old tree had been hit by lightning and had opened up some space in the canopy to let in some light.
The moody light, lines, and textures made me think to convert this image to black and white for this weeks challenge. Also there was not any significant colour in the image before conversion.
Specific Feedback Requested:
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
f16, 10sec, iso100, 24-105mm lens on full frame at 76mm.
Is this a composite?
Not a composite
If you would like your image to be eligible for a feature on the NPN Instagram (@NaturePhotoNet), add the tag ‘ig’ and leave your Instagram username below.
Bryan, this is a nicely spooky view, with the light hitting the trees behind and the roots and big arching branch and snag in front. The roots coming down from that branch are terrific. (There a bit of Brian Froud feeling in those roots.) The trail back into the forest adds good depth. The bright bits along the right edge are a strong contrast to the rest of the scene, so I think burning them in strongly would likely be good and cropping them out while maintaining the aspect ratio would cut off other important parts.
@Mark_Seaver thanks for the comments. I original tried to doge the highlights in the image but generally do like to be to heavy handed. So I spent some time with various tools in photoshop such as doge and content aware fill. This is what I ended up with. After photoshop I also applied a gradient filter with luminance mask in LR. Just on the edge of natural but have a bit more leeway with BW. I may try some cropping.
Bryan, an image with mood / mystery. Burning out the highlights on the right side as done in your second version works well. I presume the brighter rectangle on the central lit tree is a trail marker. My only suggestion is to clone out the trail marker to see if that improves or detracts from the image.
