GETTING WEIRD WITH TREES

Early last December, just before an extremely harsh winter descended, I had some success with my camera at a tree farm south of West Bend and also took some interesting shots at a horse farm in western Mequon.  I hadn't been back since the weather improved and thought I would see what these spots had to offer.  It was pretty disappointing, to be honest.  The trees had already started to leaf out, and the sun was too high in the sky (another way of saying that I should have gotten there a lot earlier in the day).  Even so, having driven all the way to the tree farm, I took some shots, visiting the horse farm on the way back.

Even though the shots were disappointing, I decided to do what I could with them in post processing. In the first couple of shots below I modified both their contrast and sharpness to produce images that look like pseudo-HDR, even though they actually represented a single, unblended shot.

 This gives them the appearance of drawings, especially in the look of the grass.

I converted the next couple of shots to black & whites and then, not satisfied with that look, selectively brightened what the camera had recorded as green.

This tactic not only provided more contrast with the dark tree trunks, it gave the grass the appearance of snow or frost.  Not realistic, but an interesting effect, I thought.  I also liked the balance in the first of these shots.

As I said, I stopped at the Oldenburg horse farm in western Mequon on my way back.  Again, conditions simply weren't as good as they had been in the fall when conditions had included a dense fog to provide depth to the shots.  Because I was disappointed with conditions, I again fooled around with the images in post processing.

In this first shot, that I converted to black & white, I again selectively brightened the green shades to create the following somewhat surreal image.

Weird and almost with the appearance of infrared photography.

Here is a second shot, which included in the foreground a grass field in which the dandelions were in full bloom.  In this case I darkened, rather than lightened, the green but lightened the yellow (dandelions), creating a polka dot effect in the foreground.

I'm not sure I like the foreground effect, but I do like how the false shading of the colors affected the woods in the background.

Just trying to make the best of a less than ideal situation.

John