I may have walked past this tree a hundred times in our forest. I have no idea why I have never taken notice of it until now.
I saw the opportunity to try an HDR photograph. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. The idea is that the photo will employ a complete, balanced set of values ranging from pure black to pure white. Traditional photography usually does not portray a full gamut of values, due to limitations of the camera and the visual medium (i.e. a photo print). Until recently, the artist had to post-process the photograph to achieve a high dynamic range. Masters like Ansel Adams used careful metering, exotic film and paper stock, and laborious darkroom technique to bring out a full gamut. Now, there are cameras that process in HDR mode automatically. I took this photo using semi-traditional means. I got semi-traditional results, meaning that this is a poor example of what HDR can really do. Shooting directly into the sky probably did not help.
What I did was take three pictures of the same tree. One picture was on a normal aperture, one had the aperture make the picture too dark, and the last was overexposed. I used Photoshop to superimpose the pictures and create a tone map. More recent versions of Photoshop can do this automatically, but my Photoshop is too primitive. Besides, I wanted to create HDR manually.
I wish I had brought my tripod, or at least used the camera's "bracket" mode, which would have created the shots in quick succession. Small jiggles in the camera created problems when I superimposed the images. Although the tree in the middle looked correct, the trees in the background looked blurry from multiple exposures. Carefully, I erased as many of the mistakes as I could. After all that, I realized I liked the blurry look as it gave the central tree some gravitas. So, I re-created much of the blur.
I think that in its formative years, this tree may have been infested with a fungus which caused it to grow cankers and twist its limbs. The tree seems to have outgrown the infestation, since the tall trunk above seems healthy and normal.
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