Onegav

The sky was moodier than yesterday, and it had those “sky cracks” as I call them, where the cloud cover has areas where its thinner, allowing the sun light to pierce through. So I went back to that tree from yesterdays post that I didn’t quite capture as I wanted to.

Its obviosuly a pretty straight forward composition, a tree on the edge of a harvested field, with not much else around it, other than a distant tree line on the horizon. Thats why I needed something in the sky to give it some emotion.

Those “sky cracks” I mentioned, for me when trying to capture images like this are really important. Beacuse the light is behind the tree, and its very soft light becasue of the cloud cover, everything risks being super soft and pretty dull in colour. The cracks in the sky let light through, illuminating some of the scene and they also give some drama to the sky. I love them!

For the images today, I waited until the rain stopped, and the crack in the clouds moved behind the tree; then it was just a matter of positioning myself to capture the most of the light coming through, whilst maintaining a clean composition.

I exposure bracketed all of the images today, to grab as much dynamic range as I could, but even with that the little light that was coming through the couds was only just enough to capture some colour and details in the tree, and the drama in the sky at the same time.

I think this image above, would have been pretty much exaclty how I wanted, save for the bush on the right setting the composition off balance. I was on my own today, but if I’d have had Livvy or Izzy with me, I think asking them to stand on the left would have really made for a supeb photograph, nicely balanced.

Learnings – I used my polarising lens today, to help me pull some more colour through the sky. It helped a touch, but the light was just a notch too weak, and pretty much directly infront coming through the tree.

Still, its a neat composition, and I think I’ll be back here a few times in the future to try and capture it in different lights. At cerain times of the year the sun will set behind this tree, that would be pretty cool!