“The days get longer, clocks go forward, and the sun blesses us with a bit more light each day; spring is on our doorstep.” – Ed Lehming

While I have been spending a lot of my time on the trails in the mornings, there is also something to be said for the late afternoons as well. There is a soft, warm quality to the light, which I enhanced here through the application of a filter. The image already had a nice glow to it, but lately I have been pushing my processing boundaries a bit, trying new things till I find a ‘look’ that pleases me.

As I’ve said on previous posts, my goal as a photographer, is to communicate the sense of mood in my photos, not just capture the scenery. I’m trying to express how that scene made m feel at the time and sometimes the original image lacks that. Yes, there are time that I am able to achieve this goal with just the image itself, but other times I look at a photo and say to myself, “This is just not how I saw it”. Fortunately, I have so many tools at my disposal that a bit of experimentation gets me closer to what I want. In this case, shifting the tones a bit more to purple, while retaining the warm orange tones of the beeches and pine bark got me what I wanted.

Nikon D800
Tamron SP 24-70 mm f/2.8 Di VC USD @ 30 mm
1/250 sec, f/22, ISO 400