Saturday, December 4, 2021
It seems that here lately I’ve been traveling for hours to get a photograph and while I don’t necessarily mind doing that, it does get a little old after a while. Since I didn’t really have a lot of time available this morning, I didn’t even have the luxury of traveling in order to take advantage of the clouds. I had to be back home by 10am because my daughter was driving up to get the oil changed in her car and I didn’t want to hold her up. I knew that I was going to have some high and mid-level clouds through the morning hours and the clouds would be building during the afternoon. I didn’t really want to go out during the afternoon because I was needing to prepare for the Decay Workshop that I’m putting on for the Charlotte Camera Club tomorrow. That left me with about two hours or so that I could work with before needing to get back home.
It became a matter of where I could go in order to get some photographs that were reasonably sure things. Looking at the sunrise forecast, there was a good chance of color in the sky at sunrise and that meant that I had one option already figured out. There is a spot off of the Blue Ridge Parkway that I have been wanting to get back to for a sunrise after a number of years away from it. That could work, but it was about 45 minutes away from home which would pretty much make this a one and done location. The other option I considered was a location much closer to home that I have just learned about. It seems that there is a dealership on the side of US421 that has expanded their property and is in the process of clearing the land behind the dealership. They have made a little news in the area of Wilkesboro with a tree that is on the property. They have done an admirable thing and left it standing as they clear the area around it. Why did they leave it standing? Well, according to what I’ve been reading, this tree is roughly 400 years old. OK, that is pretty impressive and it is still alive. What is even more impressive is the size of this tree which I saw on a posting on Facebook about a week ago. The picture still had some of the Fall leaves on it, but even with that I could tell that it had an amazing structure. What was even better was the fact that the land had been cleared around it in preparation for the construction.
I had the opportunity to lay eyes on the tree in person on the way back from dinner with Toni on Friday night. The tree was bare, but I could see a lot of potential to the location. I didn’t get out to really study it, but I was liking what I saw in the evening light. I started to think about how best to capture this tree and did my normal cloudy day thoughts, but that really wasn’t getting my attention. I also thought about using a colorful sky from a sunrise or sunset, but it was a bit too complex to leave totally in shadow. I needed to have light on the tree to really make it stand out. The more I thought about it, the more ideas that I came up with. When I was looking at the forecast for the sunrise, I could see that there was going to be a great chance for color in the sky, and then I might luck out and get the sun to bathe the tree in warm light after it came up. I could try it from both sides to get the sun behind it for the color in one, and then flip it to the other side to have the sun provide the light on the tree. It was worth the chance, and knowing that the construction was steadily going on, I didn’t want to risk losing my chance to photograph this tree in a natural state.
Since Toni was getting up early to go to work, I was starting to get out of bed around 5am which would give me plenty of time to choose between my two locations. According to the forecasts, I would have equal chances of color at both places, so I opted for the one that was fleeting and special. I didn’t leave until a little after 6:30 which was nice for a sunrise shoot. With the sun cracking the horizon at 7:20, I wanted to get there about 30 minutes early to make sure that I could figure out the compositions. I had a feeling that I was going to be using the Rokinon 14mm lens for this tree to capture the scope of the size. Beyond that, I really didn’t have an idea of what I was going to do. I just wanted to make sure that I avoided things that didn’t add to the story of the tree. It was going to be a simple composition no matter what I ended up doing.
When I got there about 10 minutes after I left, I pulled over on the shoulder of the road. I started to see problems right away. There were two large piles of mulch from where they had chipped all the lesser trees. Around the entire tree was an orange construction fence. You know the one…the plastic temporary fence. It was up to keep the workers from accidentally damaging the tree which was a wonderful thing. The only issue was that fence did nothing at all for the photograph. I hadn’t really seen that before and hadn’t realized that I was going to need a solution to the problem. I needed to come up with a solution really quick because the sky was already quite colorful to the East. I grabbed my gear and started to walk around the tree to see what I had to work with. Looking into the sunrise, I was faced with the mounds of mulch which didn’t really work for the composition since they would keep me from being able to separate the tree from the horizon line. If I looked South, I could fully see the Lowe’s Home Improvement Store lit up like a Christmas Tree. If I shot looking North, I had the mulch piles again to deal with. My only option was to shoot to the West, away from sunrise. This was my plan for later in the morning, but it was going to have to work for the early images as well.
I got the camera out and fitted the 14mm Rokinon lens that I love to use, but don’t get the opportunity that often. I got in nice a close to the tree and set the camera up on the tripod. No matter what I did, the orange fence was still there. With the extra wide angle of the lens, I also had to worry about the construction equipment parked just out of the frame to the right. The sky was starting to light up, so I really didn’t have much time to consider my options. I just figured that the fence was part of the story and I started to click away. The colors were decent, but not quite a far reaching as I had hoped they would be. I was seeing some magentas and pinks behind the tree which was welcomed. As I was making more and more exposures as the sky changed, I realized that the color was fading and I also realized that if I got a little lower, I might be able to obscure the fence a little bit more. I hated that I had missed the color before realizing that, but the camera was kind of low and I was having a hard time seeing what I was shooting. With the light show over for now, I moved the neck of the tripod to the horizontal position and splayed out the legs to have the camera nearly on the ground. I then recomposed best that I could and got things set up for the next round of images when the sun lit the tree up.
It was hard to tell, but I was sure that I still had the fence in the frame, and I was desperately thinking about how to minimize that fence. It was not really in a position that I could clone it out because there were trees behind it that would be obliterated by the cloning operation. I was thinking that this whole series of images might be for nothing because that fence might just ruin the images for me regardless of how they looked overall. I just tried to get the strongest composition that I could before the sun went for round two.
It didn’t take long, and I was shooting again. Things were even more difficult now because I can’t use live view and the histogram with this lens since it is a manual aperture model. I have to use the light meter and the only way to use that accurately is by looking through the lens and the viewfinder. Well, I can’t manage that, and the top light meter doesn’t register the same as the one in the viewfinder with this lens. My only chance was to get a base reading on the light and compare the light meter on the top display to see where the image was happy. It appeared that if I over-exposed the image by 2 and 2/3 stops, I was right on the money for the lens at f/11. That was how I kept track of the changing light so I could adjust the shutter speed as needed.
The light on the tree was really nice and there was still a bit of color in the sky behind the tree. I was actually liking this execution better than the one with the more vivid colors in the sky. I think I have just gotten to that stage of the game where the typical sunrise and sunset shots bore me, and I much prefer the less saturated light. I wouldn’t know what worked out until I got home and looked at the images on the computer monitor. I had a sneaking suspicious that I wasn’t going to like them at all because of that fence.
Before we get into how I approached the edit on these images, I want to talk about the fence for a bit. Yes, it was part of the story as the tree was being saved from the construction. That is true, and that is how the scene appeared when I shot it. I do pride myself on shooting things as I found them, and I would have never considered moving the fence. I also really didn’t like the fence and recognized it as a temporary element in the scene. It is kind of like my two-week rule when retouching portraits. If something will be there in two weeks, I’ll leave it. If it is more temporary than that, I’ll remove it. I just didn’t like the idea of a neon orange safety fence stretching along the entire right side of the tree. I had managed to conceal it on the left side from the lower camera position, which was nice, but now the fence stood out even more.
As I went about editing the two images from the tree, I found that the sunrise one was just a little too complicated with the different colors in the sky with all of the branches intertwined. I finished the edit just in case I wanted to keep it, but I was kind of putting all my eggs in the basket of the second round with the sunlight. That photograph actually did turn out quite a bit better in terms of lighting and colors that all worked together. It was fairly desaturated and had a much calmer effect than the sunrise image. This is the one that I really wanted to work on, so I spent some extra time fine tuning the colors and getting everything just right. I really liked the image…. except for that darn fence! It was just an eyesore and even if I desaturated the fence even more, it was still too obvious in the composition. I tried to use different cloning tools to remove it, but that just became an avenue to ugly town. No matter how I went about cloning the fence out I was left with a much worse image than when I started. But I knew that I had to do something, or this image would never see the light of day.
Now, I’m not the most proficient with Photoshop, but I’ve been learning some tricks here and there. This was going to be one of those times when I put my knowledge to the test. I came up with a plan to essentially clone out the fence by replacing the trees. It really isn’t much different than using a clone stamp tool, but with the perspective of this lens, I had to keep in mind the converging verticals of the trees. There were no trees that I could sample to clone in, so I was going to have to create some. How I figured that I would do that was by sampling the trees on the left side and creating a layer based on that selection. I would then flip that selection horizontally so that the trees were now in the correct direction. I then warped the sample to have it cover the area that I needed it to. From there, I just used a layer mask to blend it into the original layer. Essentially, all I did here was replace the trees that were already there with trees that were unspoiled by a fence. It is kind of cheating, and I would say that it goes into the realm of image manipulation, but I think that the essence of the manipulation was so minimal in the grand scheme that had the fence not been there, nobody would have been the wiser. I do feel that I owe it to everyone looking to let them know what I have done with this image, so I am not being deceptive about what I photographed.
The end result is a photograph that I had previsualized at the scene. It is accurate to how my mind viewed the scene because from the beginning I wasn’t wanting to see the fence. I am now able to share it with you so you can see this beauty in its natural state. I could have waited for the fence to be removed and gone back to shoot it, but there was a very good chance that there was going to be pavement all around it, and possibly a building nearby. Even if that wasn’t the case, the next time that I came by, there might have been construction equipment in the way. I might never get the chance to photograph it again under these conditions. I took all of that into consideration when it came to shooting and editing this photograph. I do hope that you understand.
I was at this location hunched over my camera for about 45 minutes as the sun made its way into the sky. When the sun tucked itself behind some clouds, I could tell that the light was done for the day, and I was clear to move on. I still had some time before I had to get home so I started to think about another subject that I could visit in the time that I had. I had about an hour or so left, and that was plenty enough time to work a location. I just needed to figure out what I wanted to capture. I went down the list of locations that I have shot in the area and considered what might work with the sky looking like it was.
One of the first places that came to mind was a barn that was actually not too far from home, but on the other side from where the tree was. I had shot this barn almost a year ago to the day. It had been a chance encounter with the subject, and I had shot it rather quickly. Since that time, I’ve really liked the image because of the orange tree behind it, but I was less happy with the scraggly tree that I had put in the foreground. The edit was also a little subdued for what I wanted to see out of the scene. I had considered doing a fresh edit on it a few times now, but it was that foreground tree that I had included to block the roadway that bothered me enough to not worry about a fresh edit. My other option and my personal favorite at times like this is to just get a whole new image that has the improvements that I wanted to see in it. The sky was looking right for this to be that chance. If I was lucky, the sun would actually hit the barn and the tree while the clouds provided some nice darkness and mood behind. The question was going to be would the light work, and would the tree still have any color to it?
Well, I was there in a matter of minutes and had driven a total of 13 miles to that point. The barn was looking great and the tree behind still had a good many of the orange leaves attached. I honestly couldn’t remember how it compared to the previous time, but I liked what I saw. I went ahead and pulled off on the side of the road and grabbed my camera with the long 70-200mm lens attached. I knew that this was going to be my best choice for this barn since it was what I used last time. Since it was much too early to go and knock on the door to see if I could get closer to the barn, I chose to stick back on the edge of the property by the roadway. I screwed on a polarizer to control the glare on the roof and to saturate the tree a bit more and then started to find my composition.
I really wanted to avoid the one green tree and worked hard to that end. Unfortunately, I found that the only way to avoid the tree was to get a little bit further into the property than I would typically want to do. There were no fences, and the property was rather large. I was back on the back end near the trees that divided two properties so as not to encroach too much into the yard. I was maybe 20-25 feet into the property at this point but found the composition that I wanted. I fine-tuned the framing and started to make exposures as the clouds changed overhead hoping for a bit of sunlight to hit the scene. I didn’t get the sunlight, but I did get better clouds than I had the previous time which was nice.
As I was clicking off exposures, one of the neighbors rode up in a golf cart to check on me and figure out what I was doing. I fully expected something like that to happen and the meeting went smoothly. I offered up a business card and asked that he give it to the owners when he saw them next. If they are interested, I’ll be very happy to bring them a free print of this barn. I did hate to be this far into the property but weighing out everything I felt safe in taking the chance. Had I been asked to move on, I would have had no recourse but to do so and chose to take that risk. I’m very glad that I did because it all worked out quite well. This wasn’t my intended subject for the day, but it turned into my favorite photo of the two.
There wasn’t nearly as much editing involved in this one as the previous. In fact, the only serious editing I had to do was to remove a few stray branches on the left side that were coming in from the tree that I was working around. I could have shot around them, but I would have had to get into the property another 10 feet or so, and I figured it was worth cloning them out instead of going deeper into the property. This new image of the barn has so much more pop compared to the last attempt. That is due to better conditions, a better idea of what I could do with the scene, and better skills editing. It is times like this that I really enjoy because I can look back and really see where I’ve improved in my photography. It gets me excited for this time next year when I’ve added even more tools to my box.
This was a very quick trek, and I was back home with less than 19 miles driven for the day. I had two different scenes shot and I had two images that I was really happy with to show for it. There is a third that I’m not sure about right now and might come back to later on. I’m extremely happy with the two photographs that I have here and I’m excited for what they represent. There is one where I did some very heavy lifting in Photoshop and even did some local adjustments after the cloning by way of layer masks which was a first for me. I’m slowly getting more versed in Photoshop, and I can see all sorts of possibilities that can be opened up with it. The second image was shot in nearly identical conditions, but I had slightly better light this time. even though I started out very much the same, I ended up with a much stronger image than the first time which shows just how far I’ve come in only a year. That is impressive considering how long I’ve been at this. My learning curve should have flattened out a bit by now and at times it has. There are other times like now when I stretch what I know I’m capable of and come up with something even better than I thought I could. I needed this boost from these two images, and I’m glad that I woke up early this morning to go out and get them.
Now it’s time to really get prepared for the workshop in the morning. I’ve done this one many times so I can just about do it in my sleep which is a comforting thought. I have a great group put together and I’ve been talking with each of them for a few days now. The weather is going to be perfect for photographs too, so I just can’t wait to get this rolling tomorrow. If you are considering a workshop with me, I have a mini-workshop coming up in May that is dealing with compositions in the landscape. I’ve got a couple of participants already committed to attending and both of them are alums from previous workshops I’ve done. I guess that means that I’m doing something right in the realm of teaching. There are another two or three that have expressed interest in going as well, but there is still room as of right now. If you are interested in learning a bit about how I view making compositions, get signed up today to lock in your spot before it gets filled.
As always, if you particularly loved one of the photographs from today, I would be honored to help match you up with a print. The same goes with any photograph that you see in the blogs or in the galleries. All you have to do is enter the title in the print order dialog box and select the size. I’ll have it shipped out usually the next day. If you want something bigger than I have listed, just email or call me and we can do the special order thing to ensure that you get just what you are wanting. My goal is that you are completely satisfied with the experience and the print. Don’t forget that if you are in the area of Wilkes County, I am also offering portrait services now on location and in the studio. I still have really good rates as I am still learning that side of photography and I’m also willing to discuss doing some free sessions depending on what you are after. These would be sessions where I would experiment with some different techniques, and you would get free pictures as part of the deal. Just contact me and I’ll see if your project qualifes.
Until next time….
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