Tree-mendous?

[dewmuw]

Views greatly appreciated:

http://www.pbase.com/image/23023221.jpg

http://www.pbase.com/image/23023227.jpg

[Anthony_S]

First a few words on trees. In my experience, they are deucedly hard to get a good pic of. It's sort of like that old saw about the blind men and the elephant. It's well nigh impossible to get a sense of the whole thing.


Top pic:

What I like. The subject is quite appealing. The contrast of the peeling bark tot he vibrant leaves is nice.

What I want more of: Focus. I have this same problem all the time with close-up pics of leaves. Many macro settings reduce the depth of field such that an angled planar surface like a leaf will go all the way through the depth of field, presenting out of focus areas. This can be dealt with by carefullychoosing what area is in focus. In this photo I can see exactly what the issue was. We want the bark to be in focus as well as the leaves, but unfortunately this leaves a big out-of-focus wash of red in the foreground. Prime real estate wasted. You were a good nature photographer, though,and resisted temptation to snip off the offending leaves.

bottom pic:

What I like: The most intersting part of this photo (to me) is the curved hedge and the driveway. I dig the light on the hedge as it rounds the bend.

Not so much: The tree in the foreground is unfortunately distracting. Again we have a wash of out of focus brightness in the foreground that is a bit jarring. I understand the desire to have the tree in the photo, butI feel we either need the whole thing (a difficult proposition) or less of it , but utilized as a framing element.

It is your photo, so where you want to go with it is your decision, but something like this, perhaps:

http://www.anthonysloan.com/treehedge.jpg

[dewmuw]

Thanks for the comments - really helpful.

It was a bloody windy day too and would the leaves stay still for me - would they heck as like!