The hill fog made this image feasible. For a long time I’ve known about these trees and how good they could look in the right conditions. Hill fog is often too wet to work in, but over the last couple of days we’ve had fog with quite dry conditions, so I was able to risk climbing down to capture this image.
I was sure it would work best in Black and White, particularly in foggy conditions when colours are muted anyway. The mist also gives a kind of aerial perspective (over a short distance) which gives an impression of depth. I wanted to use the wooden fence as a lead in to the scene and to give another impression of depth in the image. In fact there’s a physical depth to this image, as the ground falls away very sharply.
20 mm, 1/20 sec, f/22.
This original image is quite flat. I composed it to use the fence as the lead in to the central tree, while keeping the hazy trees in frame. The branches closest to the camera would be much darker than those in the distance. The depth of colour in the bracken and sky will be similar and can be made much lighter in the black and white conversion.
The image was first made more contrasty, using ‘levels’ and ‘curves’ adjustment layers, then a Black-and-white adjustment layer, where the sliders were adjusted to get this image.
I feel that this Black-and-white version works so much better than the colour version. It’s a much more powerful image than could have been expected from the colour version.
The elements of contrast, line and volume are used in the scene.
I got the image I set out to capture.
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