The color in southern Utah was fleeting this year, at least where I was. It was fading out of these two trees.
D850, 70-200mm
Repost:
Original:
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Beautiful intimate, Harley. Those two trees pose nicely in front of the weathered sandstone canvas. I took the liberty to download and fiddle with the file to see how I might interpret. You may or may not like what I’ve done.
- Crop to eliminate some of the foreground
- Color dodge the yellow leaves
- Selectively burning the “lights” in the sandstone
- Add a strong vignette
1 Like
Very nice image, Harley. I like the contrast between the trees and the stone. The wall offers a nice backdrop to how these two small trees interact. While I like Dave’s rendition, I prefer the original more subtle image. I think the vignette does help the image. But because the comp is so perfectly simple, my eye isn’t drawn out of the center subjects without it.
Beautiful scene. I love the contrast between the curved and colorful trees against the rigid lines of the cross-bedded sandstone. The green grass, although lovely, feels a bit too prominent to me, though. Maybe just dialing back the saturation and lightness of the grass would put it more into the “background”.
Thanks for the excellent feedback and suggestions. I toned down the grass and put in a slight vignette at the top, plus removed the white rock at the base of the trees.
Harley, it looks like your visit to Utah was terrific. This is another great take on “Red Rock” country. I like the subtlety in this view, with it variety of gentle colors. Burning in the grass gives the trees and rock wall more visual weight. The shapes of the trees and all of the textures and colors in the wall are excellent.
I so much prefer the second version where the grass is not competing with both the wall and the trees. I might even go further and try and make the grass a little bit more yellow so it harmonizes with trees although the rework does a great job in keeping focus where it’s supposed to be. Man, what a trip you had.
Beautiful image Harley! I think its stregnth is its simplicity. Regarding the grass, it may be splitting hairs, but I think the redo is too dark. Somewhere between the original and the redo would be my vote.
The re-post nails it Harley, the changes are subtle but very helpful. This has been an outstanding series from your Utah trip. The colors and textures of these canyon walls are just so interesting and varied. This image would even work well without the fall color, but the tree is just the icing on the cake for this scene. Very nicely done.
The repost works best for me here, Harley. A really neat find on this small isolated scene too… 
There is so much to look at and enjoy in this image. I could look at it for a long time and discover more things about it. I like the repost very much. The whites in the original and the amount of grass look much better now.