Intro

Dubbed "Hansel and Gretel" by my friend C, she's right – it's fairy-tale, slightly sinister and magical. It's all in the light. This shot is pretty much straight out of camera. Scroll right to the bottom if you want some tech notes, and hover over the picture for annotations.

Background

I'm in Presidio, a spectacular part of San Francisco, staying with our buddy Pilot Pete, and it's my birthday. So I wander off out for a short walk to see what's around. The location is stunning: old trees, tall trees, and very few people. It's the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, the sun is in an interesting position, but I can't really tell, because it's raining cats and dogs. But one never knows what's next.

The Tech

85mm was all I took out, but it's an excellent lens, fast and sharp. What else does one need in a lens? ISO 800 might seem excessive to some, but it's my all-purpose general ISO ever since Snake Eyes, which I blew up to A1, put it on exhibition, and couldn't see any noise. And undoubtedly it's not as clean as 100 ISO, but that only adds to the texture of the image. It's sunset, and the light is low, but the sky is quite cloudy, dispersing the light somewhat. There's a line—a layer, if you like—of trees to the right of the main group, and they're chopping up the light into nice chunks.

I don't want anything flat here. I've chosen a spot where there's a good set of highlights on the trees, and their shapes are interesting enough to form a tunnel-passage-like route to the horizon. I've placed the long lane in the shot, because I liked it, and the large tree on the right frames and balanced the left. I wanted to boot up the contrast too, so I underexposed by 1.7 stops, to flatten the shadows and emphasize the light.

There wasn't much correction needed at HQ, it was quite fine on the camera LCD, but since Lightroom generally does its own thing with the image preview once you import, white balance is always going to need a tweak. I swing between (1) wanting to accomplish as much as possible in camera and (2) shooting as flat and low contrast as possible so I can see everything on the LCD in advance. Focusing into mid-foreground allows the background to drift into boke and smoothening out the texture of the picture.

Deep hyperfocal is fine for making pretty pictures, but I've long thought that sharpness is more critical for the near points of a landscape full of fractal details—our brains can fill in for the far distance—perhaps someone has analysed this?