This Madrone resides right at the back of our property and we’ve been working the last few years to give it a bit more breathing room from the surrounding firs. The other evening I noticed that the red/yellow bark was catching the sunset and decided to try photographing it. I never seem to get the results I want with landscape images so I thought I’d post where I am and get some advice from people who know what they’re doing.
What technical feedback would you like if any?
Anything you notice. I’ve removed a few bright dead branches and a fence post-do they show?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
To me, this feels like the tree is leaning back. How do I prevent/fix that-assuming it feels that way to you as well?
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
5DIII, 28-70 f/2.8L @ 68mm, tripod, ball head and cable release, f/20, 1/10 sec, iso 640, manual exposure. Processed in Lr & PS CC. Slight straightening and crop from the bottom
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Dennis, the warm, rich light you have on the Madrone is very pleasing. The tree trunk has saturated color, but it looks very natural given the time of day this was shot. In the small version some of the shadows look blocked up. But in the large version if you give your eyes a few seconds to adjust, there is shadow detail there. So overall I think you have done a good job with the processing, and any object removal you have done is not really evident. The composition looks good, i like how you included some blue sky in the upper right. One question I have is if you shot from a tripod, why did you use ISO 640, unless it was windy you could have used a lower ISO.
The top of the tree does seem to be leaning back slightly (away from the viewer). I don’t really find that to be a problem. If you want to try to correct it, the Edit / Transform / Perspective tool in Photoshop can be used to play with it. I add canvas, use the rectangular marquee to select the top half of the tree, and then used Perspective to pull the top edges of the selection away from the center. The first image below shows how this looks in progress, and the second show the final result after some cropping to remove blank canvas. At least to me, I think this helps a bit. This approach is similar to one described by @Lon_Overacker in another recent post where he corrected distortion in some leaning trees in the background.
Thank you, Ed. An excellent explanation. I’ll play with it. As for the iso, it’s probably just habit. As a bird photographer in the dim, dark Pacific Northwest, iso 640 seems low to me:grin:
Dennis,
First of all, kudos to you for giving this nice tree some “breathing room” How did the firs feel about that? 
Seriously though, that sure paid off in letting the late light create a nice glow in the trunk and tree in general. You get that late, warm light combined with colors already present in the tree and it can look pretty intense, like it is here.
No issues with the bg sky; there’s color (not washed out gray) and there’s enough included that I have no thought of wishing it wasn’t there.
Also no evidence of any cloning/removal. I see that the fence top is still visible, which doesn’t bother me. And cropping it away is not a solution.
I really didn’t notice any leaning or perspective. I guess the simple explanation is that you’re looking in an upward direction and perhaps there’s the keystoning effect… And man, that @Ed_McGuirk doesn’t miss anything! And has a good memory!. His change is subtle, but actually quite effective.
Thanks for stopping by You know, a big tree is really no more complicated than a little flower… 
Lon
Nice shot Dennis, I really like the nice contrast of the tree trunks against the dark background and the colors work together. I had a look for the fence post and couldn’t see it.
I do find the empty sky a little distracting and it looks a tiny bit overly contrasted to my eye in some spots but my shots tend to be under contrasted so…
I’m going to take a bit of a different tack on this. I would not shoot this at sunset in this manner. The madrone bark has a natural red bark which is here being overwhelming by the warm light at sunset. This warm light is overpowering the madrone and the beauty of it’s own bark is lost (or diminished). I would look for different light to shoot madrone.
