My buddy & I revisited “The Tree” once again, a perfect +high tide that will give the illusion that a single tree growing in the ocean, which it actually is, & by looking at the forecast for wind conditions with 5-10mph breeze we decided to chance um’. We arrived there early Saturday morning & 1st thing we noticed, no wind, maybe a slight breeze here & there. Why was the wind so important? I wanted to shoot a long exposure, 3-4 minutes long to smooth out the water & streak the clouds, & if the wind was blowing it would blur the leaves on the tree, with that said I did have an alternative plane that in my pre-visualization I’d use the blurring of the leaves in my composition, so either way would have worked for me.
I've posted my original, unedited raw image below, I purposely overexposed the image knowing that I can recover the details in the highlights in post. I also tried something different, at least thinking wise, by overexposing the image, I could darken the shadowed areas in post & not introduce any noise or hot pixels. Granted viewing the image on the back of my camera looks like CRAP, I had to suck it up & carry on with my experiment. My settings for this image was 181 sec exposure, f/8 & ISO 100. I did bring down the exposure & shadows in specific areas in the foreground but wanted to keep some detail of the wooden plank to make the viewers eyes look deeper into that area. As an artist I have to be aware that this in camera image is just a sketch or final draft of my vision & knowing what I can do in post will bring out the beauty of the final image. I also did crop the image just a tiny bit to balance the composition.
There were some unwanted reflections on the wood plank in the foreground that I had to remove, that annoying yellow leaf (which I should have removed at the time of the shot, laziness shows it ugly face once again!) & on the very bottom of the image there were a lot of white rocks that I removed, I thought they were too distracting. I added the golden light back on the horizon, which was actually there, for a little while, & added some textured highlight contrast to the clouds.
Original RAW unedited image below…
Original RAW unedited image
Aloha a hui hou my friends!
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