» Tree Photography by Andy Stafford

Tree Tunnel, Watermead Park

Oct 202009

Tree Tunnel, Watermead Park, Leicestershire

This shot is was taken one lunch time in Autumn. I’d gone out a few days earlier in search of rich autumnal colours but I didn’t really see anything that I liked. When I found this scene I was intrigued by the light more than the colours and knew it could look really striking in black and white.

Unfortunately it was windy and the end result had some movement in, so I made a note to come back again when conditions were better.

This retaken effort was processed in exactly the same way as the original but fortunately none of the leaves are blurred :)

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Somewhere near Llanfairfechan on the North Wales Path

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Sep 132009

Somewhere near Llanfairfechan on the North Wales Path

This image was taken during a short break in North Wales. The main purpose of the visit was for a family walk to the summit of Snowdon (and of course for me to take plenty of photos) but unfortunately the weather was too poor for either. In the end this was the only image I really liked from the trip, which was taken on the only really sunny day of the week, before the rest of the group arrived.

A Hoya circular polariser was used here to darken the sky and improve the contrast in the rest of the shot.

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Technical info : Sigma 18-200 lens at 18mm, 1/160s (because it was windy and I didn’t want the grass to blur), f8.0, ISO100

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

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Sep 052009

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

It’s funny how sometimes the last shot of the day, the one you aren’t really expecting to be that special, turns out to be the favourite. This was taken at the end of brief walk in and around Swithland Woods one lunchtime in February this year. It had snowed a few days before but it was all gone now, leaving water lying in the fields and paths. This still water had been my original reason for going out, but as I had a few minutes to spare and no shots that I really liked I ventured into the woods and noticed how the bare branches of the trees filled the view above me.

After finding a suitable spot and waiting for a plane to pass overhead I took 3 bracketed shots. These were then processed in Photomatix to produce a black and white HDR which I then toned Lightroom.

The title, which is borrowed from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, was the first thing I thought of when taking the shot.

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Misty Morning, Beacon Hill

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Jul 162009

It’s amazing how frustrating taking pictures in the mist can be. I took quite a lot the morning I took this before I noticed just how much water was on the lens itself – it was also bitterly cold and the last thing I wanted was to keep taking my gloves off to clean the lens.

I liked the composition of this shot at the time but it sat on my hard drive for quite a while before I worked out what I wanted to do with it. In the end I added a texture to give some extra substance to the mist and did some minor editing between the two trees to increase the light there, as for me this was the focal point of the shot.

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Leaning Tree, Bradgate Park

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Jun 202009

Leaning Tree, Bradgate Park

One of my first experiments with monochrome HDR photography and still one of my favourite images. This shot was taken about 30 minutes to an hour before sunset on a sunny but bitterly cold and windy winter afternoon out with Dan in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire. The angle of the sun lit up the grass, and the shadows added depth in front of the tree – I’ve been back to this location since but I’ve never found the light as favourable.

Three shots were used, each two stops apart (-2EV,0EV,+2EV). Processing was done with HDRSoft’s Photomatix Pro, with the black and white image then being split toned to give it an antique look.

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Winter Tree Redone

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May 092009

Winter Tree

“Winter Tree” was my first real attempt at creative processing, rather than just using Photomatix to make a shot look extravagantly real (I was going to put “hyperreal” here but I couldn’t bring myself to do it). The initial version was an accident – one of those rare “I wonder what happens if I…” experiments that gives a pleasing result. Unfortunately though my inexperience at the time though led me to overlooking some serious flaws with the original image – the contrast was all wrong and the image was noisy.

The poor contrast in the original version was due to my monitor being poorly set up – it was far too dark – and whilst the noise level isn’t that obvious in the version elsewhere on this site (http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree/) it is painfully apparent on the large version available on Flickr (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3340/3194854394_305882a0a9_o.jpg).

Why was the image noisy? Because my Microsmoothing setting in Photomatix was too low (0). It made the clouds look more dramatic but I didn’t see how badly it was affecting the quality of the image as I neglected to look at it at full size.

If I was ever going to make this image available as a print I knew I was going to have to go back to the original raw files and reprocess it. Details of this process can be found here http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree-and-photomatix/

Visit http://www.hdrsoftwaretutorial.co.uk/ for tutorials and a discount code which will give you 15% off the purchase of Photomatix.

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Curbar Edge Stone Circle

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Apr 092009

Two photos today, both from the same location, Curbar Edge Stone Circle in Derbyshire.

Curbar Edge Stone Circle

I was lying down when I took this, as I often seem to be now when taking photos. I’d never really thought of it before, but since dispensing with the tripod it gives that extra bit of stability and allows you to get shots that look a bit different from everyday snaps.

I had originally intended this shot, along with all the others from that day, to be in black and white and they were all taken with either green or red filters attached, but there was something about the distribution of colour in this one that made me decide to tint it (and the other shot here).

As with Shimmer a green filter and an ND4 grad were used and then a magenta tint was added in post production.

This second shot was taken slightly earlier, whilst I was waiting, and as I’ve mentioned in another post shows how much difference a few minutes can make to a image.

Curbar Edge Stone Circle

Whilst the grad filter is slightly too low and darkens the top of the frame a little too much the subject lends a wistful air to the shot, which lead me to decrease the saturation. I think this gave a much lighter feel, a child lost in contemplation on a warm sunny afternoon (probably wondering why a grown up is lying on the floor)

Shimmer

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Apr 062009

Shimmer

My discovery of filters and their uses has increased my enjoyment of photography immeasurably. Some ND grads were recommended to me for use on skies as an alternative to using HDR. These filters are grey and have no colour cast (the ND stands for Neutral Density) and they stop a certain amount of light entering the lens – the “grad” bit refers to the fact that they are graduated, so part of the filter is clear and lets all the light pass through, but some of it is dark and lets less light pass through. Basically they allow you to make the sky less bright, which allows more detail to be captured elsewhere in the photo, such as the ground.

The shot above, which was taken in Watermead Park, Birstall, was taken with a combination of Cokin ND4 grad (P121M Grad Neutral Grey Medium) and Kood Green filters. (The Kood filters are much cheaper than the Cokin ones and possibly there is a difference in quality, but as I’m just an amateur and trying these things out for the first time I’m not overly worried at this stage – besides I get 3 Kood filters for the price of the Cokin Light Tobacco filter that I was about to buy for £30)

The green filter is really for use in Black & White photography but I find its effect can be pleasing in colour if a red tint is added in post production to calm the green down a bit. Obviously it’s possible to alter the all the different colour levels in Photoshop to get the same or similar effect, but for some reason I don’t find it as enjoyable. Using them on the camera also seems to help me with ideas – I’m actually looking at contrast and texture more than colour and am divorced from the beauty of the scene.

This was how the image looked when it came from the camera – it’s a bit “green” but it allowed me to see how the final image would work.

Original

The image below shows the importance of waiting at a spot for a few minutes – when I arrived there was a breeze and no pleasant reflection in the water :)

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