Matthew Durr Photography

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! 😀