This tree caught my eye during a walk around one of the smaller towns in Czechia, so I decided to give it a go. This is my favorite take on it so far. Shooting straight into the sun is always challenging for me, as I can barely see what I’m doing.
Obviously, it’s not a lemon tree. I’m referring to a popular 90’ song by the Fool’s Garden.
Specific Feedback Requested
Composition
It does look a bit chaotic to me and I’m not sure if there’s enough structure to hold everything up?
Colors
My arch-enemy - I never seem to get them right. This is a very simple color palette photo but I’m not sure, if they work well together. Leaves came out pretty dark on the RAW file, since I aimed for a minimal area of blown out highlights around the sun, and I wanted to bring them back their vibrant and bright colors. I’ve also exported this image somewhere around 10K times to check with adobe color tool, if things “look” right in terms of a color scheme. This is the best I came up with.
Tonality
Is the contrast & dynamic range OK to you? Or does something feel off, here? I’m not sure if my relationship in tonality between leaves & branches is OK, given it’s a shot straight into the light source. I didn’t want to have trunks with no details whatsoever, so I opted for some higher values on them.
Technical Details
Focal length: 16 mm
Aperture: f/14
Shutter speed: 1/60 s
Hand-held
I’m a “heavy processor” so even my simple images end up with multiple Ps layers. Used techniques include:
Local & global contrast
Color adjustments (for unifying and warming leaves)
D&B
Perspective correction (for the super-wide angle lens pointing upwards)
Cropping (to a 2:1 format)
Minor cleanup (distracting twigs at the edge of the frame & dust spots)
Hi and welcome to NPN. I think this is a great example of a single color image and overall looks pretty natural to me although the darker yellow does seem a trifle forced. It’s tough when shooting directly into the sun. In terms of crop, I think you could lose a bit on the left and center the main trunks a bit more. The structure has enough presence for that to work I think. They look dark enough against the sunlit leaves to me. I like it. Oh and thanks for not cranking up the blue. The softness and pale color feels right.
Thank you for your thoughts. The color itself produced some problems, as leaves were rendered pretty dark in RAW, so I had to brighten them up quite a lot. These darker ones didn’t get same brightness treatment as the others, so they may stand out. I’ll see what I can do in this regards. As for crop, I also think that left side could use some trimming, and - potentially - whole compostition could benefit from even more CCW rotation, to be more balanced. I already did that, but maybe there’s room for more. I’ll experiment with that as well.
Also, thanks for the input about tonalities - these are tricky for me as well. As for blue hues - whatever I did to them, the came very unnatural to me, so I opted for softed, bright look for them.
I think this is lovely! The sun star is a perfect touch!! I think you hit the blues just right, and don’t mind the darkness of the darker leaves but they are a bit flat, lacking some detail. I’m not sure how best to dig any out, but possibly some was lost in brightening? Getting detail in yellows is difficult for me. But I do like that some are darker than others.
I don’t think it needs any cropping or rotation. It might be nice to clone leaves over the ends of the 3 larger branches that exit the frame.
Thank you for your thoughts. I’ve taken a closer look into leaves’ details - brightening might be the issue here, although there wasn’t much detail in the first place. I’ll probably rework the brightening part and introduce more contrast to preserve them.
As for the crop - which three branches do you mean? The ones that point to the left hand side edge, or the top one?
The heaviest one that exits the right and the two larger (top and bottom) of the three that exit the left. Might leave the middle one so maybe it’s not so obvious it was touched up.
As for blue hues - whatever I did to them, the came very unnatural to me, so I opted for softed, bright look for them. 