I don’t expect to win any composition awards with this photograph. What was I trying to capture was the pleasing warm light on the white bark on this plane tree (an ornamental in the same family as the American Sycamore.) I saw this light was I was leaving work. I did not have time to seek a better vantage point. And this kind of light is notoriously uncooperative; by the time you do get the perfect angle, the light is gone. So, I decided to just fire away with the camera to capture that light, and forget composition. The wires are distracting, I know. But I do think the warmth on the tree was captured well, or at least reflects what I was seeing in my mind’s eye. The darker trees around it, and the shadows on the lower trunk of the plane tree serve to make the warm sunset-lit areas stand out. You, as the reader, may not be as impressed, but I guess you had to be there.
I took this image with a Nikon D90 and the best cheap wide angle Nikon lens, the Nikon 18-55mm AF-S DX VR. This lens has been pretty much welded to my camera lately. When I don’t know for sure what I am going to be photographing, I put this lens on. At least it’s that way in winter; in summer, when flowers and insects abound, you are more likely to see me with may favorite cheap macro lens, the Nikon Micro-Nikkor 60mm F2.8 AF. This is on program setting. In post-processing in Aperture, I did tweak the saturation and vibrancy a little, but without boosting the color past what I recall the original scene. I’m not entirely convinced I have the saturation right, but I can always go back to fiddle. Yay digital!
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