If you are unfamiliar with this series, start HERE.

Old, dilapidated, and even dead trees can be an interesting subject for photography. The way mangled and broken-off branches appear in a picture evokes emotions, sometimes of despair or death. An old photograph I’m revisiting, this “before” was shot on a Nikon d40 with a 50mm f/2 AI wide open, at ISO 800 and 1/400 (at the time, I really didn’t know much about exposure, ISOs, sharpness, etc.):

This first snap has many things going against it. For one, the sky is completely blown out (since I foolishly exposed for the tree). Second, due to the aperture choice, detail is low. Finally, there is a lot of noise due to the high ISO (this is an OLD digital camera, ISO 800 is pretty high for it). Once I uploaded it to my computer (I was using iPhoto at the time), I instantly knew what I wanted to bring out of the picture: an artsy dark silhouette set against dynamic clouds in the background with a nice grain drawn-out from the large pixels of a 6 MP APS-C sensor. 10 minutes of tinkering with the sliders and histogram later, I ended up with this:

I can’t really put a definitive title on this one, though I like both “Quoth the Raven” (since there’s a single, small bird on top of the tree) and “Climactic”, so we’ll just go with those two.

That’s all for this blast from the past guys and gals, thanks for dropping by. As always, have a great day!