Working the Image - Kellerwald-Edersee NP Edition
I’ve often mentioned that often all it takes is an interesting detail in nature that will get me excited about image making. I’ll drop my bag and spend some time thinking about how to craft an image from that one detail. On one of our last hikes in the Kellerwald-Edersee National Park, that detail was a group of 3 trees that stood downslope from our hiking trail. All three trees were interesting, but we were looking down on them and the image was just way too chaotic from where we were at.
So I decided I needed to get a bit lower to get past some branches that were in the way and to hopefully make something that’s worth looking at. The slope was steep and I had to carefully make my way down with only my camera, a couple of lenses and a tripod. Unfortunately, shuffling down the slope presented me with two related problems. The first was I was now much, much closer to the trees than from the trail, the second was that with the tree on the left, that meant I lost the interesting part of the tree. Given the incredibly bright sky, I could either go with a really, really wide angle lens (meaning I’d also have to climb back up the hill to get the lens) and have the sky dominate pretty much everything, or I could try to find a composition with the lenses I had. I decided to stick with what I had.
Putting on the widest lens I had with me I made the first image below.
While the vertical image managed to keep some of the interesting upper branches of the middle tree, it left the left-hand tree pretty much standing there doing . . . nothing. Nothing but make one wonder why that tree is even in the picture.
Thinking perhaps the oddity of the tree to the left was due to the vertical format, I switched to a horizontal format to see if it made any more sense image-wise.
No it didn’t. But the horizontal image got me thinking differently, which is a good thing (well, usually it is). First, I realized that the image is really flat when the sun goes behind a thick cloud - so whatever framing I decided upon, I needed to wait until the sun came out a bit and, hopefully, while still softened somewhat by either the edge of the cloud or higher, thinner clouds. Second, I realized that the tree to the right, which I’d largely not focused on, had a lovely sweep to its branches and that it may be possible to construct an image with two of the three trees that originally caught my eye.
So I moved over and downhill a bit (easier said than done on the fairly steep slope), to get under the branch from the tree to the left and to find a composition that included the main sweep of the front right tree while keeping some of the interesting aspects of the middle tree.
Overall, it’s the best of the compositions and probably the best of what could be done there that day. The image captures that sweeping branch like I’d hoped, and the sunlight adds some nice quality to the main subject and the tree to the left. There’s nothing much I could do about the background, but that’s the way it is sometimes. Just because something is interesting or beautiful doesn’t meant mean that a photograph can capture what you’re seeing. The eye has a tremendous way of filtering out what it’s not interested in whereas a sensor captures everything.
All that was left, was to scramble my way back up to the trail. Which, again, was much easier said than done.