I love photos of grand landscapes but lately I am trying to focus my creativity towards more intimate and small scenes. I love photos of trees in the forest but have never captured that type of photo in a way I felt was good. I headed out yesterday to get some photos of lingering fall colors with our first snowfall in Wisconsin. I am hoping to get some feedback on this photo that I took yesterday.
What technical feedback would you like if any?
Does the depth of field work here? Should I have gone for more or less?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
I’ll take any tips on composition. I am wondering if the brush surrounding the trees makes the scene too busy.
Any other feedback is appreciated.
Any pertinent technical details:
Fujifilm X-T3, Fuji 55-200mm lens, 78mm, 1/10 sec, f/11, ISO 160
You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
Luke,
I think most would agree that forest images are often the most difficult to come away with good compositions. Order from chaos as they say.
Looks like this area has great potential with the mix of trunks and leaves. Is that snow in the bg?
First, I don’t think the brush makes this too busy. You’ve got some main, dominant tree trunks that help give this a little order and the mass of leaves doesn’t make this any more or less busy, I think. What I first notice though is the main trunk and how it’s positioned in the frame. For me, it’s too close to the smaller trunk (with the red paint… you can clone that out.) One of the challenges with these type scenes is finding pleasing spacing and trying to avoid merges. I try and move myself left or right, lower or higher perspective to get good balance and spacing. Then again, you may have purposefully left a bit more space to the left of the main trunk to let the bg snow show more?
Another thought is the main trunk seems a bit close and this might also impact your decision of depth of field. It’s close enough that you’ll want this tree sharp, but then how much depth and sharpness the rest of the frame. Looks like the 4 main trees are in pretty good focus and close enough in the plane of focus that even a wider aperture could get them in good focus while throwing the rest of the bg a little more soft. Then again, a focus stack could get it all sharp. I’m just not sure which way would render this scene the best. Not sure if I’m helping here.
Of course I wasn’t there so don’t know any of the constraints outside the frame, but I’m betting it’s even more chaotic and you’ve done a good job isolating this already. And so backing away or zooming out might not have worked?
Having said all that, the more times I view the larger version, the more it grows on me (bad pun). I’ll just go back to my main nitpick and that would be the main trunk needs some space between it and the smaller tree right next to it.
Oh, the color/sat and processing in general look great.
Lon
The repeated vertical trees with the horizontal green layer makes for a strong composition.
Lon brings up a lot of good points in this image. Composition is really important in forest images. If you’re going to bring a tree that close to the frame it better dominate the scene. In this case it’s big yet it doesn’t dominate in interest. It actually blocks the scene. You want to look around it.
If the message is a forest with new snowfall I would design the comp to feature the snow more strongly. There is a portion of this image that shows that and would make a stronger image.
Thank you Lon for your comments! That is snow on trees in the background.
Thats a good point about the main trunk being to close to the trunk to the right (I did not notice the red pain on the tree while on the scene or during processing! Darn red/green colorblindness.). Next time I will try to move a little bit to the right in order to create more space between them for better organization.
Thanks again!
Hi Igor! Thanks for your input! Now that you mention it the main trunk does dominate the scene pretty strongly. I see your point that it blocks the scene.
