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A Gnarly Shot
22 July 2024
We included this image in our Flaming Flora slide show because the high contrast made it seem the color image was in flames.
Gnarly. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 27mm (54mm equivalent), f5, 1/200 seconds and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
But we wanted to see what it looked like in black-and-white. So we tried it.
It's a confusing scene to begin with. There are a lot of branches on this old tree and the February afternoon light was harsh.
So we did two things after all our tonal adjustments didn't clarify anything.
First we rotated the image, turning the portrait orientation into landscape.
Then we cropped it so the heavy branch at the top was merely a border and not a hazard.
It helps to see it a bit larger than our usual thumbnails, too. You can climb into it.
Finally, we colorized it, using the Camera Raw Filter's Color Grading panel to give slightly different color casts to the highlights, midtones and shadows. Where the high contrast merely confused the structure of the tree, the colorization reinforced it.
But we'll have to live with it a bit before we decide whether it would make a good print.
OTOH, it certainly does express with some eloquence how things are going around here for us these days. Gnarly, indeed.