New eBook Release: The Perfect Shutter

I'm delighted and a more than a little excited to announce that my new eBook "The Perfect Shutter" has just been launched! Published by the wonderful team at Craft & Vision, the Perfect Shutter is a book about the creative use of shutter speeds in landscape photography. You can buy it on the C&V website by clicking this link.

It's been a number of years now since I first started experimenting with different shutter speeds to create different effects and moods in a photograph. Most often by the sea, but also by rivers and waterfalls, and occasionally sky and vegetation, I'm fascinated by how the passage of time - the 4th dimension - can play a part in an image. It seems strange that you can depict something you can neither see nor touch in a single still photograph, but there it is.

In the book I talk about the different tools and techniques for achieving different effects via shutter speed, with an overarching theme of using such knowledge intentionally to best realise your own vision. David duChemin describes the book as follows:

“I believe that every photograph has a ‘perfect shutter’—that magical sweet spot where the depiction of motion within the photograph best conveys the intended vision and emotion.” – Duncan Fawkes

I’m excited to introduce The Perfect Shutter from landscape photographer Duncan Fawkes. Duncan has a body of work that so impressed me that I was thrilled when he said he’d share his knowledge in an eBook for us.

In 180 big, beautiful spreads, Duncan shows you how to refine your vision by putting technique into practice, adding stronger mood and intention to your photographs by sharing his knowledge of the basic fundamentals, tools, gear, visualization, techniques, and subjects, before expanding into more advanced topics such as deciphering ND filter numbers, panning, intentional camera movement, and blending exposures. In his “Making the Image” section, Duncan includes 10 photographs that walk you through the how and the why of his personal choices in creating those images.

Whether you want to photograph silky waterfalls, energetic waves, the sky, or even the wind, The Perfect Shutter leads you to find your perfect place to creatively capture the landscape as you experience it. Nature renews itself every morning: reframe how you see it.

Download your copy before 11:59 PM (PST) on June 15 for just $6.00 (a 25% savings). Learn more.

For the Love of the Photograph, - David duChemin

If you'd like to read my book it is available from the Craft & Vision website. Better yet it's discounted from $8 to $6 (25% off) until June 15th, so go grab a bargain!

And if you're into bargain hunting they also have a bundle deal with the hugely talented Michael Fyre's Exposure (which I also have and recommend) for an additional 20% off - both books for only $8.80. You can get them both here.

Timed with the book release I sat down with Jeffery Saddoris to discuss my photography on the C&V podcast. If you're interested in hearing my thoughts (and a lot of umms and ahhs!) then you can listen to it here.

On a personal note, the release of this book is quite obviously a huge highlight for me. Not only does it represent years of work - and the usual cliches of blood, sweat and tears - but also it's a real honour to be featured by Craft & Vision. Regular readers will know how David duChemin through his blog, photography and Craft & Vision were instrumental on helping me onto the right path artistically at the start of my photographic journey. In a sense things have come full circle and I'm so very grateful to contribute back to C&V and its readers, of which I've been one all of these years. I'm very grateful to David and the team for the opportunity and their belief in me. I think the final product looks amazing and I'm very happy with it.

I am grateful to and humbled by those of you who have supported and encouraged me all these years. To have people interested and engaged with your work is truly one of the greatest gifts to an artist. I thank you.

 Buy it now for only $6.

Shot Planning for the Strawberry Moon

Last month I missed the full moon by a day. The following evening I watched it rise an hour after sunset into darkness. It was quite magical. I determined I would go out on the next full moon, rising mere minutes before sunset in the hope of something interesting.

June's full moon is called the Strawberry Moon. Not, as it happens, because it turns pink as many are led to believe. Rather it's the name given by Native American Indians because it marks the start of the strawberry picking season (see here or here).

I've spent a lot of time back on the beach at Angourie since that night, mostly around Mara Creek. My first inclination was to return to there. I have  something in mind for a rising full moon with the creek rippling in the foreground. Yet I was concerned that with so much time spent there recently I might end up making something derivative of the rest. I almost felt like I'd gone too far down a tunnel and might be becoming blind to other possibilities.

Deciding that a change is as good as a break, I chose to go to a different location. I say different but it still a familiar location as I tend to revisit the same half dozen places local to me that I've developed an affinity for.

I thought back to an image I made in March that I titled Eternity. This was made just a bit further north, on the rocks by what are known as the Blue Pools. The shot then was of a near new moon just before sunrise, sitting above the channel through the rocks. I wondered if I could use these rocks and that channel in a similar composition with the full moon rising. The key question of course was would the moon be in the right position this time around?

I like to use The Photographer's Ephemeris (http://photoephemeris.com/) on web and iOS to help me plan my photographic outings. However on anything but a grand scale the maps lack the resolution to see a particular composition. Typically I use TPE to give myself a high-level understanding of where the sun and moon will be, and so how it might interact with the landscape of a location.

Normally I know the location, and can fuse the knowledge from TPE with my experience of a place to reassure me of its potential. I think of myself as a 'finder'. By that I mean I like to go out and find things for myself. I find it can be difficult to repeat shots I've made before as so many elements tend to be different - light, weather, tide, my mind - and so try to find fresh things each time.

But on this occasion I wondered if I could improve on or, more accurately, create a complement to Eternity. I decided to use TPE to reverse engineer the photograph to see if a recreation might be possible. The photograph's metadata in Lightroom told me that I made that photograph at 06.14 on 19th March. TPE lets you see the sun/moon position for any time & date in the past or future, so I rewound the TPE clock back to 19th March. This told me that the moon was 90.1 degrees. Fast forward to Tuesday 2nd June, and the moon would be rising at 109.7 degrees - almost 20 degrees difference which I knew meant the same shot wasn't possible.

[A less instinct led and more scientific based approach would probably consider the angle of view (Aov) of the lens I was using (Zeiss 21mm) to determine quite where the full moon would be in relation. But remember, I'm a finder!]

As another check, I opened up another photograph from this spot, this time looking further south. In TPE I dropped the secondary pin on Angourie Headland which is visible on the horizon. TPE told me this was at 137.8 degrees. So the moon was going to rise towards the left hand side of this photograph. With the channel still prominent in the foreground here I was reassured that even if my initial idea wasn't going to work that I could make something of it.

My final part of planning was checking the tide. Whilst there are many possibilities in the rocks at this spot, given I was after a 'certain look' I wasn't sure I could fulfil my own brief. More importantly, these rocks are prone to getting battered by the sea and rogue waves occasionally wash right up the rock slabs. Angourie translates to "Noisy Ocean" and is a surf reserve for good reason! If the sea didn't behave, I might not be able to get to the rocks in question and even if I could I might not be able to move freely on them.

Comparing the tide tables for 19th March and 2nd June I could see that the tide would be lower and that I should be ok. I packed the car and drove the mere 5km down the road to Angourie.

Upon arrival, I noted a layer of cloud on the horizon that would assuredly block the moon's initial rise. Despite clear skies forecast and above me it's always what's on the distant horizon that catches you out.

I managed to get onto the rocks I wanted without problems, and started setting up. I checked out the channel and there were a few potential compositions as well as confirming that my original composition wouldn't work (using TPE on my phone I could see the moon would be out of shot).  I don't tend to get too fixated on a certain composition, set-up and wait. When photographing by the sea possibilities come and go by the minute and you may even find your position swamped by the time the 'big moment' arrives. I tend to spend time looking about to find different possibilities rather than fixating on one shot.

Part of my finder instinct is that if something catches my eye I go for it. Quite often I go out with one idea of what I'll photograph and return with something quite different. So it was here as I watched the big waves rolling in, the light of the setting sun catching their spray as it filtered through the palm trees behind me. I pulled out my 100-400mm lens and started adding to my series of "Waveforms", a combination of "short long exposures", panned and ICM wave portraits.

As the moment of moonrise approached, I switched back to the 24-70mm and started to re-check compositions along the edge of the channel, paying particular attention to the sea. The tide may have been further out but with a bigger swell than in March the waves were still coming some way up the rocks, ruling out some shots I had sighted close to the rock's seaward edge.

As the moon breached the distant blue cloud and moved into the pink sky, I took a few telephoto snapshots with my Fuji XT1 before returning to my Canon set-up on the tripod. I made a series of shots as I worked up and down the channel, until the sea pushed me back and the colour faded from the sky. The resultant shots were not quite what I had originally envisioned, but made for a worthwhile trip. I've fallen in love with moonrise, it feels like a truly magical moment. Next month I shall probably try my luck down at Mara Creek.

On Focal Lengths, Zooms and 'Multi-Primes'

As is fairly usual when I started out in photography I used zoom lenses. I can’t think of a non-zoom kit lens so it’s typically what most of us start with. I remember being in awe at ultra-zooms' (some with 60x optical zoom!) ability to zoom right in on something almost sniper like. It was like something out of a movie. It felt cool. The biggest problem with a zoom is that it can, well, zoom. This means if I wanted more or less stuff in the frame then I would just twist the zoom ring to change the frame. Because we start out with zooms I think we think this is what we’re supposed to do.

Appreciation of Focal Length

The problem here is twofold.

Firstly whilst focal lengths control how much is brought into the frame (a wide angle having a wide angle of view, a telephoto having a narrow angle of view) this perhaps isn’t their main purpose. The main aesthetic impact of focal length is to do with the relative size of objects.

With a wide angle lens, things close to us are relatively large in the photograph, and things further away progressively - and quickly depending on quite how wide - get smaller and smaller. Intuitively we know that objects that are larger are closer, and objects that are smaller are more distant. A wide angle exaggerates this perspective and helps to create a sense of depth in an image.

On the flip side longer telephoto lenses make distant objects appear larger, closer in scale to foreground objects. This is what is called compression, a term I found confusing when I started out as it was always used but never actually explained! A long lens compresses our sense of perspective, near and distant objects are closer in size in the photograph and so appear to be physically closer to each other.

Both of these effects are important to understand and invaluable to our ability to make stronger photographs.

The problem with zooms is that it is very easy to spend all of our time worrying about “how much stuff” we’re getting in the frame and not enough time worrying about the relationships between the objects that are included.

Position is Everything

The second issue is regarding position. Position is everything. As Ansel Adams famously said "A good photograph is knowing where to stand."

Zooms provide the ability to stay in the same position whilst completely changing the frame of the image. Too much stuff? Zoom in a bit. Tree in the way? Zoom in a bit.

Having and using zooms means that we spend less time thinking about our position, using the zoom to compensate instead. Often we stand in the wrong position using an inappropriate focal length for the photograph we want to make.

With a fixed focal length lens I can’t just twist the zoom barrel if the framing isn’t right, and if I want things to be bigger or out of the image I need to change my position (or take a conscious decision to swap lenses).

It focuses the mind on the effect of focal length, not just in terms of angle of view but in terms of the relationship of objects in terms of scale. It means I can’t be lazy and stay in one spot, I have to move to the best position for the best photograph.

Benefits of Prime Lenses

To address this you could consider using prime lenses. Primes have numerous advantages:

• Lighter: than a zoom covering the same focal length/maximum aperture.
• Faster: they tend to have wider maximum apertures to let in more light.
• Sharper: historically prime lenses were much sharper than zooms (...historically, I’ll cover this in a second).

However for me the standout advantage of using a prime is the solution to the zoom's problem; you can't zoom to compensate for your position or framing. A fixed focal length helps to understand the effect of focal length and physical position on an image, as well as the constraint it brings.

I swapped to using primes several years ago and I can say that it really works for your ability to visualise images. When you are in the field, shots at familar focal lengths appear more readily. I guess this is because human beings are the best pattern recognition machines in the world; we recognise the things that have worked in the past and can repeat it.

Zooms interfere with this pattern recognition. With an infinite number of positions between the zoom limits, it becomes more difficult for our brains to develop those patterns and so to recognise them in the field. I’m not saying it’s impossible of course, but I do believe that primes are a great way to assist the process of visualisation. Almost paradoxically the constraint of a fixed focal length helps me to find more and better shots where I might otherwise be overwhelmed by the options offered by a zoom lens.

My experience of leading workshops leads me to believe that the single biggest issue most people (including myself) have is in initially sighting and visualising photographs. Anything that helps with that has to be a good thing.

Back to Zooms

However despite using primes for several years I’ve now predominantly switched back to using zooms. Let’s look again at the advantages of primes and why I’m comfortable with this:

• Lighter: an individual lens may be lighter, but if I take 3 lenses at 24mm, 50mm and 100mm instead of the one lens covering the range then it’s probably double the weight overall. If you go the primes route I think you need to embrace the concept of constraint by not carrying a prime for every situation; you spend more time changing lenses and rob yourself of the ability to see with a particular focal length.
• Faster: most of the time this isn’t an issue for me. 90% of my images are probably made on a tripod, somewhere between f8 and f16 and erring towards longer shutter speeds. My Zeiss 21mm and Canon 24-70 are both f2.8 if I need something faster, but I don’t generally need something f2 or faster (never say never tho!).
• Sharper: as I said, historically primes were sharper. But in recent years the gap has very much closed and some zooms are very close or compete directly with primes. For example some internet tests (:roll eyes:) of the Canon 24-70 Mark 2 show that it is close to if not exceeding some of Canon’s prime lenses. Personally I find my Zeiss 21mm slightly sharper, but even if primes are a touch sharper I’m not sure it’s in a particularly meaningful way ("does it show up in print?"). Sure you can pixel peep the differences but there are few usages where a good quality zoom is not perfectly acceptable.

The lighter overall weight, simplicity, no need to change lenses in difficult/inclement environments, being able to change focal length where my position is compromised (think waterfalls and cliffs) and the good enough (great enough even) results of the zoom win out for me.

Using a 'Multi-Prime Lens'

However going back to zooms means I miss out on the significant creative constraint aspect of the prime, and the ability to constantly see the world at that focal length. When I started reverting to zooms I found the good shot finding habits I had developed with primes starting to slide. I started to zoom just because I could and without giving it too much thought. Fortunately I becamse aware of this and have tried to address it.

The most important thing I have done is to stop thinking of my zoom lens as a zoom, but to think about it as a ‘multi-prime’ lens. Most zoom lenses have markings showing key focal lengths (normally popular prime focal lengths). For example on my Canon 24-70 I have markings for 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 70mm.

The practice that I have developed is to pre-select the focal length on the lens. When I visualise an image, I work out what focal length and position I think I will need to accomplish the shot. I will then set the lens to one of 24mm, 35mm, 50mm or 70mm as appropriate, move into position and put the camera to my eye.

Often I will get it right or pretty close. Sometimes I will get it completely wrong. I’ve become very used to working at 24mm - and 21mm, I still have my Zeiss 21mm prime lens - so I see shots relatively easily with that focal length. It tends to be at 50mm and 70mm that I still have work to do in visualising the effect of the focal length, simply because I use those focal lengths much less.

When I get the focal length wrong by a decent margin I tell myself not to zoom. Rather I lower the camera, reconsider what focal length I should be using, select it, change position, and then return my eye to the viewfinder.

Once I have the focal length and position pretty much locked in and the camera tripod mounted, I don’t mind finessing the focal length via the zoom ring to get the framing just so. We’re only talking about a few mm either side, and always trying to think if a change in position would be preferable (even an inch can make a huge difference at wide angle).

One particular issue with this approach is that I am still free to change my focal length so it becomes harder to develop that pattern matching ability. A common suggestion is to tape down your lens at a particular focal length for a week or even a month to develop a stronger appreciation for that focal length.

Althought I feel I have a good sense of different focal lengths I’m keen to ward off complacency and expect this sense would regress over time using zooms alone. Pre-selecting the focal length definitely works, but I think the discipline of sticking to a particular focal length periodically might also help to keep the vision muscle trained.

If you feel you don't have a good handle on different focal lengths or appreciate how constraint helps you to find shots, it might be worth trying the multi-prime approach for yourself. It might seem like semantics, but subconsciously I think it helps to reinforce the value of particular focal lengths.

Thoughts on Shutter Speed from Glen Sligachan

One of the things I've been developing over the last 6 or more months is a more creative approach to the use of shutter speed. Rather than a 'short' or 'long' binary switch, I like to consider shutter speed as an analog dial allowing us to dial up or down the degree of detail in the water to taste and to suit a particular shot. I particularly love the streaking that gives the water a sense of personality when using a mid-length shutter speed of 1 second plus or minus 2/3 second.

Though it suits some shots, I think full detail in the water often provides a confusing and distracting element in a frame. Conversely a very long shutter speed pushing the water exposure towards white for the 'silky water effect' removes any sense of character in the water, it just becomes white blobs in the frame. In between the two though there's the possibility of retaining some of that detail, that real sense of flow and undulation.

I often wonder why, when presented with raging torrents and stormy seas, we want to tame them into placid milky foam. In these elemental environments it is precisely the raw power and personality of the water that I want to capture. If it's a raging torrent, let it be so!

I thought I'd share an image from Glen Sligachan to show you what I mean.

Here's the first shot, looking towards Marsco down Glen Sligachan and the raging torrent that is Allt Dearg Mor (the one the footbridge crosses). Not a unique shot, indeed quite popular though most tend to shoot towards Sgurr nan Gillean and the Cuillin Ridge rather than Marsco, which I think is a particularly photogenic mountain. Still, I find it impossible to drive past Sligachan without stopping such is its beauty.

Already aware that I prefer to avoid very long shutter speeds these days, this shot was made at 1.6" at f/16 and ISO100. I had a polariser and a 3-stop neutral density filter on, the combination of which will block out between 4 and 5 stops of light. It's quite a nice shot I think, but when I look at the water it feels too placid. In particular, the white of the plunge pool holds very little detail and as a result interest. It's quite a large expanse of an image to be close to white and unsettles me.

Note that with other more gentle cascades you may find that 1.6" would retain reasonable detail in the plunge pool. Conversely with a large crashing waterfall, even 0.5" may record too much foamy movement in the plunge pool to keep any detail. The point here is that each time you encounter water you need to use some judgement and spend some time getting to know it to choose the perfect shutter speed. Each shot has a perfect shutter speed, but it's not fixed it's something you have to discover.

For the next image I've pulled out the 3-stop ND filter and I'm now using a 1/5th shutter speed. Note that in so doing I've nudged my polariser and there's a lot more glare on the rocks - oops! This is the main reason I often use a polariser around waterfalls.

Looking at the water itself there's a lot more detail in there and so to me sense of motion through the frame. Let's inspect more closely side-by-side.

The overall feel of the water in the shorter exposure is much more like what I would associate with a turbulent pool and a raging river. Observe that the exposure is still long enough that the detail has been 'smeared', so we don't have the full detail but rather the implication of detail.

Unfortunately the shorter exposure was just a tad under exposed, and the glare on the rocks from that nudge on the polariser means I'm not fully happy with this frame as is. Instead I take both exposures into Photoshop as separate layers (in Lightroom, select both, right click, "Edit In", "Open as Layers In Photoshop") and I use a layer mask to 'paint in' the more detailed water. You may also note that I've dialed down the opacity of the layer with the water exposure to 53% to reduce the extent of the detail in the final frame. Actually having a separate exposure like this allows me to dial the detail up and down as suits my taste back in the studio.

There's a few more tweaks I've made elsewhere in the image to result in the final image below. Some may prefer the original, smoother version but I much prefer this more turbulent rendition of Allt Dearg Mor and Glen Sligachan; for me it better suits its wild feeling location.

Making the Image #1: A Trip to Padley Gorge

When I launched my website last year I started a series of posts called Making the Image that intended to show the thought processes and workflow that went into the selected images.

Sadly for a number of reasons these fell by the wayside. The main factor was time. I sort of bit off more than I could chew expecting to churn out quite long and exhaustive posts on a regular basis. However I've decided to kickstart the series because I think it's important and something that will really help people.

As an improving photographer I always wanted the opportunity to get "inside the head of the photographer" to understand what they were thinking, understand their process and what steps they took to get to the final image. This, more than books talking about photographic concepts, I thought would help to embed good practical advice that I could use in my own photography. Now I feel like I should try to offer whatever insight I can to others.

Making the Image

The purpose of the series isn't to show off my images, or how amazing I am. Indeed, I want to keep it honest and show you how haphazard my 'process' can be and how sometimes I just don't come home with anything I'm happy with. In fact I want to share with you as many bad images as good - they're a necessary stepping stone to better images in my opinion anyway.

It will be part process, part critique, part insight into my thinking. Hopefully it will be quite revealing and that also makes it quite scary to write about. I'm scared that it will show my process to be messy, my intention to be too shallow, my results poor. People may think I'm a dreadful photographer (they may already!). But where there is fear there is opportunity, so hopefully we will both learn from the process and I'll try to 'stay true to myself' throughout. So here goes.

Noting my above concern regarding the time past posts took, I have no more time than I had then - indeed now having a second child I have even less! However hopefully my writing has improved and I can knock these out quicker. Also I don't intend to dwell quite so much and share everything about a shoot. Let's try to keep this focused and maximise the usefulness!

A Trip to Padley Gorge

An early start last weekend found myself engulfed in thick fog at Higger Tor for sunrise. With little prospect of it lifting and some time on my side I decided to head back over to Mam Tor to see if there was a possibility of getting up top and looking down on an inversion.

Sadly there was relatively little fog in the Hope Valley itself and so that hope (bu-boom-tsh) vanished. So I decided to head back to Hathersage where the fog was thickest and descend into Padley Gorge for some woodland and waterfalls, as well as checking out how well autumn was progressing.

The first thing to say is that I still find woodland a scary prospect. Not because of the dark and the noises, but just trying to make sense of the entanglement of branches in a photograph. Usually when rendered as a 2-dimensional image trunks and branches overlap and just create this confusing mess.

You might see where two trees look awkward next to each other, adjust your position or your focal length to fix it only to create another pair of awkward trees. I find it to be a frustrating and never ending puzzle at times. Sometimes I wonder if, having given it a go, this ongoing awkwardness is a sign to walk away and find something a little less hair pulling.

Here's a sequence of 16 images I shot in Lightroom.

Initial Shots

The first 4 shots are where I came across this lovely twisty turning tree with only the foggy woodland beyond that I thought would help bring it out. I quite liked the cubic rock at the base of the tree giving a soft v hard contrast between the organic shape of the tree and the perhaps man carved rock.

These are shot at 58mm. If I've learned one thing it's that shooting wide in woodland is a real challenge - it brings in too much extra clutter, tends to bring in a lot of sky (which is best avoided most of the time I think) and leaves more distant trees as indiscreet but nonetheless messy background subjects.

I'm not happy with this image. I can't always put my finger on exactly why I don't like an image but overall this one leaves me feeling pretty unmoved. Things that I don't like about it:

• it feels bottom heavy, literally. A lot of rocks, not a lot of foliage.
• perhaps the most interesting background tree in terms of foliage is behind the 'Y' of the foreground tree
• the foreground trunk snakes around the background trees but doesn't provide a strong frame
• the horizontal branch across the top I felt provided a nice conclusion to the top of the frame. Now I think it's a bit too straight against the otherwise undulating tree trunks
• the red toadstool is great but it's tiny and it's too far away from the point of interest (did you even see it? Bottom left!)
• I might be happier if the tree was to the left of the frame so that the curve of the tree lead you out then back in to the distant trees. Here it feels like it's in conflict rather than harmony.

Ultimately it just doesn't have enough going on to hold my interest.

Turning Around

Having taken this one I turned behind me to find the next sequence of shots. There were some lovely gnarly trees, with what felt like an eerie pool of light towards the back of the scene. The whole scene had a lovely luminance to it that I got quite excited about.

The next few shots are pretty much sketch shots - shots of the scene in front of me so that I can then start working out what I want to include and how best to depict it.

I originally thought I was drawn to the central trees flanked by the group of trees to the left and lone tree to the right. But the gap between centre and right is too large to be coherent, and the left hand side feels like it's falling off and even more disconnected.

Changing position slightly I start to focus on the middle clump of trees, ignoring the right, and I'm really liking the angular rocks to the front. But the composition feels muddled. I've got a clump of trees to the left, the focus on the central group of trees but not much going on on the right. In fact, I feel like the arching branch of the right hand tree is leading my somewhere - but in this shot it's just taking me out of frame.

I change position again, deciding to focus on the apparent luminance in the distance, as well as the white bark of the tree at the back and the colouring in the overhanging branch to the left of frame. Why I didn't use the arching branch from the previous frame at this point is anyone's guess!

Firstly I love the luminance on the moss on the rocks and quite like the arrangement of rocks towards the bottom right corner. However the tree coming in from the right of frame is very large and dominant. Add to that the tendency for the other trees (all towards the right of the image) to lean to the left then the whole image just feels heavy on the right and feels like it's pushing down on everything on the left as if about to topple over. The image really needs something on the left to balance the visual mass and feeling of downward pressure on the right. This is supposed to be a relatively serene image but it feels too oppressive as it is.

One other annoyance - common across these images - is that there are two trees that are pretty much central where the trunks sort of merge together. I was aware of this whilst making the shot but separating them seemed to cause other problems. For example, I lost the white bark, or the large trunk to the right started pushing too far into the frame. I wrongly chose to make them overlap more to make them appear more like the same tree, but this just looks weird in the final frame and was a bad decision.

I've then tried a few different ways of processing these images trying a cooler treatment, warmer brighter treatment and then a lower key treatment. I'm not sure about any of them but it's interesting to note how much these different ways of processing pretty much the same image alter the feel. Post-processing really does have an important role to play in affecting our reaction to the final image.

I then tried eliminating the large trunk to the right, but I still don't feel like the balance between left and right works. There's just not enough on the left to support the rest of the image.

Moving Round A Bit More

Finally I moved round to the left to see what it would look like to put the white bark to the left of the overhanging branch. Instead of that shot, I found these interesting rocks and focused in on them with a semi-silhouetted clump of trees.

With the luminance in the top right, the interesting rock shapes and the relationship between the foreground rocks and midground trees I thought I'd be happiest with this image.

But the downward angled branch on the left of the trees is too graphic and distracting to my eye. I also feel like the trees are a bit too 'on top of' the foreground rocks. Taking a few steps to the left would have provided a more engaging composition by creating a triangle between the foreground rocks (bottom right), trees (mid left) and luminance (top right). As it stands the left handside - further detracted by that downward branch - feels lost, and my path through the image is too vertical from the rocks to the trees. Oh well.

To finish, in post processing I choose to return to an earlier frame and more heavily crop to remove some foreground and the left hand clump of trees.

This leaves (what was) the middle clump of trees to the left and the gnarly tree to right providing an archway through to the luminance, overhanging branch and white bark beyond, supported by a not-too-heavy group of moss covered rocks to the bottom of the frame. I think I like this one but still feel like there's a balance issue between left and right. The gap above the right hand tree revealing coloured foliage is distracting to my eye but I can't crop further without hacking off the base of the trunk which is probably a bad compromise.

I think this is the 'winning' shot from the series. Again why I didn't pursue this composition in the field is a source of befuddlement! I'm not totally happy with it. It definitely lacks the magic I felt at the time and it feels a little disjointed. I feel like I should have done better, and certainly regret dashing to Bolehill Quarry (20 mins each way) when I only had an hour left on site. Some you win, some you lose.

One final point of interest is that there's a bit of variation between each of these images - all of them shot within a few feet of each other. At least I tried to work the scene to my advantage rather than taking one shot and moving on. I always find it amazing how such small movements, even a matter of inches, can completely transform a scene.

What do you think? What would you have done differently? Did you find this post helpful? Please do let me know.