Photos

This is probably my last posting of summer aspen trees for a while. I have been playing with a number of images and of the trees and just prefer them in black and white. My alternate title for this image, "Aspen, Sodium Ferrocyanide." I'm not sure how many on this forum would get the joke.

Digressing back to my original idea; color can be useful and a great tool for composition, but can also add un-needed information. Here the idea was to show how the aspen glow in the light afte sundown. That there is great texture and shape. This possibly could have been a vertical composition, but that would add strength to the trees, and here I want to show the quiet peaceful aspect of the trees. When you are in the forest, especially with aspen, you don't just look at the trees, you listen to the trees (sorry to borrow the phrase Mr. Sexton).

And after the image is made, the data gathered, there is an opportunity again to "listen" to the image, whether in PS, The Gimp or Aperature, the image should call out and want to be rendered as it was visualized.

After walking around for quite some time, I found the view into this part of the grove that I liked. I knew I wanted almost a normal view, possibly a little wide, and a lot of depth of field. I also didn't want to take a chance of loosing the fine detail in the foreground which is also at the extremities of the image, so I chose a fixed focal length lens of known quality, my trusty 28mm Nikkor.

I estimated the hyperfocal distance, and manually focused to that distance (it is nice to have a distance guide on the lens!), as it was quite dark, the aspen and their texture sure helped for focusing.

To get close to the exposure I wanted, I used the spot-meter in the D200 (I'm not carying an external meter much now), and grabbed the exposure of the tree to the right, and then compensated 1.7 stops of over exposure, and set the exposure manually.

Not having the expensive remote unit for this camera, I just used the self timer to control vibration.

In Nikon Capture, and following in TheGimp, I cropped, adjusted the ocntrast curve slightly and then applied a little "bleaching" action to some of the trees.

I removed the color, and the added a slight blue-violet hue to make the image look more like a selenium toned silver print.