The four trees on the skyline close to the triangulation point near Arthur’s stone have always proved a fruitful subject for me. Up to now I have tended to use long lenses to pick them out from a distance and also to compress the perspective to make the sun in the background appear larger for instance. I set myself the challenge to something slightly different this week. With clear skies I knew that the sky would be quite plain without any cloud interest and this provided an extra challenge to deal with.
My first idea produced the image below. Not to different from what I had done before, but a bit more graphic and more sky. It still wasn’t different enough, so off came the telephoto lens and an extreme wide angle put on. This allowed a closer approach, but tended to lose some of the trees. An image of a single tree didn’t seem to work as well and didn’t reflect my vision as much. Eventually I found that by getting 4 foot from the lowest tree, I could include the others in the background. This created the problem of a lot of the closest tree being lost in the background that was silhouetted with the correct exposure for the sky. I needed to pick out the closest tree and separate it from the others in the background. A flashgun was set with the flash head zoom at a narrower field of view to concentrate the light on the tree and was altered to give – 2 stops of light less than the main camera exposure. This seemed to give the correct balance between the tree and sky. I like how the wider lens has emphasised the curvature of the tree trunk making it more interesting than a straight one would be. I though originally that I wouldn’t want any light on the foreground, but when processing the image it looked better with more foreground detail.
As the colours in the sky changed from blues to oranges, I wanted to try and make an image to show these. There wasn’t much foreground interest around and the trees didn’t line up with the most intense part of the sky. I passed the triangulation point? and remembered an image I had made before in daylight, so I decided to try something similar with the post sunset colours. Most of the triangulation pillar is quite dull, so I moved in close to emphasise the top and used a very wide angle lens to allow it to fill quite a lot of the frame. The metal work picked up the light well, plus the concrete has quite a nice texture on it as well. A bit more interest in the sky would be nice, but you can’t have it all sometimes.
