This tree stands in my backyard, and what catches my attention over and over are the lines formed by the branches and the contrasts of color between the branches and the leaves. I have photographed it many times, but the results are often less than satisfying.
I’ve shot it in the summer, autumn, and winter. I’ve photographed it both on clear, sunny days and cloudy, overcast days. I’ve tried different focal lengths and different angles, but nothing really seemed to capture what I envisioned. I just could not photograph the lines and contrast the way I wanted to. . .until a few days ago.
It had rained most of the night before, and the sky was heavily overcast and threatening even more rain. Walking by the backdoor, I happened to glance out and see “the tree.” But, this time was different.
The overnight rain had washed away the pollen making the leaves look especially green. The wet leaves hung down in a way that exposed more of the limbs and branches. And, the branches had absorbed a lot of the water and turned very dark, which added to the contrast between them and the much brighter leaves.
Trying to stay ahead of the impending rain and storms, I quickly grabbed my camera, with my 100-400mm lens and 1.4x teleconverter, and tripod and set up on the back deck. I took several shots of various parts of the tree using both shorter and longer focal lengths, but this was my favorite composition at a focal length of 348mm.
Because I was at least 200 feet away from the tree, the need for a small aperture to ensure adequate depth of field was not as critical, so I chose an aperture of f/11. Even at this moderate aperture, the light level was low enough that a fairly slow shutter speed of 1/13 second was needed. This was somewhat problematic because of the slight breeze that was blowing intermittently, but the solution was to simply wait for the breeze to die down before I pressed the shutter button.
In Lightroom, I made some minor adjustments to tone down the bright leaves and raise the shadows slightly. Finally, to mitigate the minor softness caused by using the teleconverter (which I ultimately did not need for this shot), I ran the image through Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI software, and that took care of the softness problem.