Trees in painterly abstract, and trees a bit more straight-up.
The cover image is mostly straight-up. It’s my favorite of the week. It’s a tree outside my living room window. I took the picture from inside the house. It’s not perfectly sharp, perhaps because of that. In processing it, I gave it a cool tone and desaturated it a bit.
The result is pretty much what I had in mind when I took the picture–cool tones, like the weather, but magical, with the water drops on the branches having a Christmas light effect. With the 16X9 framing, it looks a bit like a still from a film.
The rest of the images are from the Grand River Nature Area Preserve/McGraw Park just east of Ada village.
The first two are pretty straight-up photos, but isolating parts of trees. Of these, I think I like best the one that focuses on the circles of ice around the trees.
The rest are more abstract or impressionist. I used a slow shutter speed (an eighth of a second, if I remember right) and panned the camera up as I snapped the picture. In one case, I panned horizontally. That one doesn’t work as well. It gives me an anxious feeling like something’s wrong. But the motion blur works well in all of them.
All of the images this week have a cool tone, reflecting the gray weather we’ve had for the past while. It can still be beautiful, but you have to use your imagination a bit to find it, compared to bright sunny weather with lots of greenery.
Just so you can see a bigger version of the cover image, here it is again, along with a monochrome variation. I added a bit of a blue tint to the monochrome to match the tone of the other images.
I definitely like the color version better. But the monochrome one works too.
No Ordinary Light 