White Birch

[denise ippolito]

Canon 5D
24-105mm
ISO 320
1/50 sec at f/ 10
HH

Hiking thru the woods today and I saw this floating in the creek-

[Mike Moats]

Hey Denise, I really like shooting birch trees as the bark has really nice textures and contrast with the white and blacks. I like the diagonal positioning. The rich water color works well with the white of the birch. I would have liked a little more DOF to bring the bark on the front and back of the log a little more in focus, but if you added more DOF it would have made the tree branches reflecting in the water more in focus and added distractions in the water, so I think is has to be this way.

[denise ippolito]

Mike, I agree-I shot several diff. angles,DOF etc. this seemed to be the best-would you sharpen the birch or does that just look played. For future ref. what can I do diff. to get this shot right?

[Mike Moats]

Hey Denise, I've shot alot of these water images with leaves and know you have to shoot more wide open to soften the reflection from the branches that add to much distractions in the water. But by shooting closer to wide open you're gonna lose some focus on the main subject. This is an image that I had to shoot wide open to soften the details in the water but lost some focus on the back side of the leaf. Somethings got to give. You could shoot this wide open and shoot mutiple image with a different focus point in the main subject and than merge them in a program like Helicon Focus or I think you can merge them in PS CS3. You just have to have a subject thats perfectly still for this method.

[Stuart Frohm]

Thanks very much for the beautiful photos and helpful comments!
Stu

[Julie Kenward]

I agree with what Mike said...sometimes you just have to do the best you can do. I'm not sure this is any better but I tried a few things and I think it gives it a little more clarity.

First, when you get a hazy water effect you can sometimes counteract that with a shadows/highlight adjustment. It can mimic what a polarizer filter would do if you had used one here. I did that to the entire image, then did a small levels and curves adjustment, followed by selectively sharpening just the branch and the little green leaves. The final thing was to inverse the branch selection so just the water was highlighted and I did a soft gaussian blur (maybe 3 pixels.)

Again...I'm not sure if this is the effect you were going for but thought I'd put it out there because I think it does bring the bark up a bit and leave the water with the same soft effect - just not as hazy.

[denise ippolito]

Jules thanks for your help,always nice to hear your .02