Sweet Light Tree

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

I shot this in New Mexico and the light was so sweet on the tree, but I just could not capture that wow factor as you walked up to the tree.

mkIII
lens 24-105
tripod
1/8@f/16
iso 100
hdr 4 images 2, 1, 0, -1

[Bruce Murden]

Curly, I like well-lit subjects beneath a darkened sky. That's what it looks like you saw in front of you, and if so, I agree the image doesn't quite hit that vision, but the lighting and colors are sweet. With the trees (main subject and supporting pine on hte right) so windswept from right to left, I would have liked more space to the left of the main bare tree. It looks to me like a live tree may be lurking just off to the left, so a different shooting location or some cloning may have been necessary to do that.

I hope some of our colleagues can offer some help to get the light on the tree up to the wow level you want. I don't have any good ideas for that right now.

[Kaushik Balakumar]

Lovely HDR work. Agree with you the light on the tree Dennis. Like Bruce said, some space on the left would be good but again the green tree (on the left edge) might have crept in. I see some dark 'smudges' around the dry tree twigs on the top (may be a HDR artifact?).
Nevertheless, a lovely image.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Curly,
I see some artifacts around the tree too. Sweet light it is! Did you use a circular polariser? I often times find this pops the colors and shouldn't affect the HDR in any way. I did a screen blend layer on the tree....didn't pop it that much....but it may work during the process earlier. Another vote for some edge clean up.

[Robert Amoruso]

Dennis,

You might try reworking this in the HDR processor. If using Photomatix try more light smoothing to get rid of the halo in the try branches. I find that playing down saturation and the histogram curve (white and black points) and coming up with a flat image that you then process in Photoshop can help when getting contrasty results from Tone Mapping.

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

Thanks everybody for your help, I have been too busy lately to touch a camera as ice fishing has been good and have to get minnows to all the fisherman to keep them happy.