I took this shot, actually series of shots, one morning a couple of years ago in the small town of Humnoke, Arkansas. I always liked this image, but I was never happy with it because I never felt the photo was sharp as I wanted it to be. Until now.
I had been out searching for a sunflower field I had heard was in the area when I came upon this particular scene. Just on the western outskirts of town is a small wetland area that is full of water tupelo trees. Driving along the highway, I noticed how layer upon layer of trees just seemed to be stacked on top of each other. I had to stop and make a photograph.
There weren’t a lot of places to pull off the road, but I finally found a spot. I was thankful there wasn’t much traffic when I first arrived, but was still a little nervous walking along the shoulder of road as cars and large truck zoomed past me.
Setting up my tripod beside the highway, I took a number of photographs. I wasn’t getting the separation between the various layers of trees that I wanted, so I kept walking back and forth to find just the composition I wanted.
After a few minutes, I discovered this particular composition. What caught my was the sunlit tree in the center of the frame and how it contrasted with the foreground and midground trees that were in shade. I set up the camera and zoomed in to get the framing I wanted, but the focal length I needed to get that framing would not give me sufficient depth of field for everything to be sharp.
To handle this, I took a series of three shots. In the first shot, I focused on the trees in the foreground. I focused on the trees in the midground on the second shot. Finally, with the third shot, I focused on the sunlit tree in the background. Then, it was just a matter of using Photoshop to combine the three images into this final photograph.