From my trip in November 2020 to photograph fall cypresses - this is a backwater in Caddo lake when the sun had barely crested the treeline and I paddled away into the fog to see what there was.
And there was this. I remember wanting brakes on the kayak so much. I had to maneuver fairly quickly before the light went and even more of the fog burned off. Used a medium telephoto to foreshorten the distance between the trees and the background. It’s one of my favorites from this morning.
Specific Feedback Requested
Thoughts, impressions, ideas for improvement.
Technical Details
Handheld in the rental 'yak
Lr for RAW work including fiddling with the white balance since this light is so hard for cameras to manage well. Lowered exposure some and then the usual curves adjustment. A little texture but reduced clarity and dehaze slightly. A crop to this ratio. Topaz Denoise manually adjusted Low Light so there was less sharpening and more noise reduction. Photoshop for some distraction removal and a reverse Clarity Action on the TK8 panel to further soften the farthest trees, but used a black mask and a white brush to paint it where I wanted it and that kept the sharpness on the closest trees. It’s on a Vivid Light layer which I changed from Soft Light and reduced opacity to 63%.
Really a beautiful photo in all respects. I love the central and balanced composition, I think it add a sense of stability to an already calm and tranquil scene.
I think this is awesome! Gorgeous. Beautiful! Stunning!!! Not so much spooky as ethereal. The treatment of the BG trees is out of this world!
My only possible suggestion is to wonder about more crop from the bottom, maybe halfway to the closest tree base. I think it could work with the flatness of the bases of the trees – similar to the way, for some images, a relatively flat dark FG can be cropped to a dramatically small part of the image.
These cypress trees are at the top of the list for me as photogenic trees, Kris. This image has a look of it’s own with the seemingly barren or off season growth and the fog or mist skirting the bottoms…
Looks like a perfect cover for a Stephen King novel…
The final post works best for me…
I put a couple variations in the OP for comparison. It’s one of those images that invites tinkering and if I don’t close it out of Photoshop, I’ll just noodle on it all day, lol.
I tried the crop suggestion, @Diane_Miller, and while I think it makes the shot bolder, it doesn’t give the trees a place to “walk” into. Sometimes when you’re amongst these trees in the fog, in a kayak, they seem to shift and change places with each other. You look away and look back and swear something is different, but you can’t put your finger on what. It’s eerie and happens all the time. I wanted to give a sense of that. Maybe it’s just me or you had to be there to feel it.
This is such a beautiful scene and composition, Kris. How fortunate to have come across this. I’m glad your curiosity brought you here. I love the softness and quiet and mystery.
Thanks @linda_mellor, @Mark_Muller, @David_Schoen & @Lon_Overacker -it’s really beautiful in a cypress lake. I have been severely tempted to do another fall workshop down there. This one was all paddling, but the guide was thinking about adding a motorized boat for a day just to be able to reach farther spots.
Thanks @KenHebert - I’ve had a lot of practice in the ‘yak! At first I processed this darker, but the fog didn’t seem to have that glow from within that it has at sunrise, so I went back to a more realistic approach since it was fairly light out at the time. Fog is one of my favorite things!
