One of the things I aspire to do in my photography is to find compelling subjects in ordinary things; to see things other people walk by and never notice. I have to admit, though, that I sometimes question whether I’m making any progress toward my goal. But, then, I’ll take a picture that makes me believe that I may be improving more than I realize.
This image is one of those pictures. It is not the kind of shot I would have even seen when I started photography, much less photographed. I first noticed this shadow one morning when I had gone for an early morning run in my neighborhood. I was captivated by the strong definition of the shadow caused by the streetlight that was directly behind the tree casting the shadow. I was determined to photograph it. The only question was when. Fortunately, neither the tree nor the street light was going anywhere any time soon, so I had plenty of flexibility to time my return.
The following Saturday, I got up very early, about 3:30 in the morning, and headed back to the tree shadow. Granted, it was hard to get up that early, but I knew I would be the only one out. I could get everything set up without having to worry about traffic on the street.
Capturing the image was pretty easy, although I had to make some minor adjustments, such as raising the ISO to 400, because of the lighting conditions. I also had to use a slightly larger aperture, f/16, to keep the shutter speed from exceeding the camera’s 30-second maximum. But, these were very small compromises to make in order to create the image, and none of them had any discernible effect on image quality, which I was initially concerned about.
I took several shots of the scene, but I quickly noticed the images all had bright orange tones rather than the soft white that I saw with my eyes. The reason for this was the light was produced by a streetlight which generally has a much cooler color temperature than the daylight white balance I use, and it was something I had not anticipated.
I tried to make adjustments in Lightroom, but I just couldn’t get the image to look like I wanted it to look. I finally realized that the subject of the image wasn’t the color but the shadow of the tree, and the color was actually a distraction. Eliminating the distraction meant eliminating the color, so I converted the image to black and white, enhanced the contrast, and ended up with this final photograph.