February 4th: Mossy trees
This picture loses a lot in the conversion to sRGB for the Web and certainly doesn’t look as good on non-calibrated monitors. I deliberately emphasized the green of the moss to the point that it seems to fluoresce. I downplayed the browns and ended up with a photo that almost looks like a painting: it reminds me for some strange reason of the painted covers of the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs that I loved when I was a child, even though this is nothing like any of them. The more I look at this photo, the more I like it. I’m sure it wouldn’t print worth a flip and I imagine most people who see this will wonder what I’m going on about.
On my initial sweep through today’s 33 frames, I thought I hadn’t found anything at all. But I kept looking and poking and suddenly I started to see some things that I liked. This picture of daffodils beside a cable TV junction box was an idea (contrast the daffodils with the word "television") and every time I base a picture on an idea rather than on what I see, it’s terrible. This time, though, it’s not so bad.
And lately I have started to take photos where there are just little rhythmic grace notes of thin tree trunks or the legs of a bus stop in the upper corner of the frame. I have no idea what that’s about but I’m going to keep watching and see if I can figure anything out.
Shooting and processing notes
When I looked at these trees, the moss everywhere just seemed to glow at me and even though I did some exaggerated work on the picture, it does represent what it looked like to me. Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 32mm, f8, 1/60 at ISO 400. I don’t think I even changed the white balance in Lightroom (going to Daylight or Cloudy looked far too warm). I cropped just a bit off the bottom so the tree trunk filled the left side of the frame from top to bottom. I then applied the Hard style in LightZone, and then added some Hue/Saturation layers where I limited the effect to the greenish-yellow of the moss (using the eyedropper) and bumped up saturation and luminosity, then chose the brown of the leaves and darkened those.
Photo a Day 2008 Links
Photo a Day 2008
Photo a Day 2008: February
Flickr: Collection: Photo a Day 2008
Flickr: February 2008 Photoset
Flickr: February 2008 Extras Photoset
No, I can see very well what you’re going on about. Great shot!
Tarzan is the only piece missing really. Check out Tarzan Returns for ferns and snakey trees. Question – why did the illustrator always have Tarzan drooping as he sat languidly in a tree?
John: good to hear from you again. I lost track of you after the trip to China and my moving around RSS aggregators. Thanks for dropping by.
Julia: the covers of the paperbacks I read were black with illustrations by Boris Vallejo inset on the front, and Tarzan was always active in the ones I am used to. See this list of the covers of the editions I read.
These are the covers I was thinking about. I have to admit, I never read any of the Tarzan books until I had to write a short piece about Burroughs. I got to know these covers as we worked with the Burroughs family for the rights to print the first book’s jacket in the magazine, but I never did figure out why the illustrator made Tarzan so seedy looking in his first incarnation.