Walking the Applegate Ridge Trail near Jacksonville, OR this slanted white oak with moss and hanging lichen catching the warm low angle late afternoon winter sun caught my fancy.
To create the image I wanted I carefully framed, then exposed for the bright clouds, upper right (Sony a7riii with 100% zebra lines just tickling those clouds). Hyperfocus point (Zeiss Batis 40mm CF @f/11) was set midway out the tree trunk. Before releasing shutter handheld (1/50", ISO 100) my dog was placed in “Park” meaning his leash was under my foot.
I’m showing the Lr default jpeg from my RAW file along with the final processed photo.
Unwanted peripheral details at bottom were cropped. Shadows were recovered. Additional illumination was brushed over the shaded left side of moss covered tree trunk. Yellow luminance was increased to better show the hanging lichen as it caught direct sun. Increasing texture further brightened moss and lichen. Finally by adding slight vignetting the dead leaves lower left became less distracting and as an unplanned benefit even more texture in those clouds was brought out.
Wonder of others like this composition and processing and if there are suggestions.
Hi @Richard_Handler, thank you for sharing the image. I really like the light on the tree. In my opinion you could have tried to take the sky out of the frame. For this kind of shot, this approach works well for me.
Massima, thanks for this suggestion. Here it is cropped (though not framed) into 4x5 excluding sky. It does become more intimate. I like both. Good idea! it’s like the choices with wildflowers, how much of the environment to exclude.
I think this has a lot of potential Richard. The light hitting the tree is what is really drawing my attention. I would agree with Massimo that the sky should be removed, which I see you did, but now I would recommend taking another crack at the processing with it removed. I think because the sky was so bright and the shadows were so dark that you likely pulled the highlights slider to -100 and the shadows to +100 to recover detail, but by doing this you lost all of your tonal contrast and that special light hitting the tree is lost. Personally I wouldn’t pull the shadows up so much, leave some sense of mystery there. If you’re using Lightroom or ACR I would try leaving the shadows at 0, bringing the blacks up to +75 or so, then bringing down the Darks slider in the Tone Curve to gain your contrast back. This method gives you deep shadows that still have detail.
Dave, interesting to use the tone curve sliders for this. Here’s the result. Of course the original framing and exposure was to place the tree in the foreground of the larger scene, so I attempted to optimize for that composition.
