The moonlight playing across the branches of this tree was so eerie that I took two photographs of it. The first image (not pictured) was photographed with an electronic flash hitting the subject straight on in the typical and ordinary way. That photograph, while being an interesting composition of stark contrast, did not convey the atmosphere that had caught my attention in the first place.
So I made a few camera adjustments and shot again. The second image (pictured above) was photographed with those adjustments aimed at minimizing the amount of light striking the subject. I stopped down the lens aperture from F/8 to F/13 (the larger the number the smaller the “hole” through which light must pass), altered the lens focal length from 42mm to 50mm (thus changing the the depth of field, meaning the range of what was in focus) and detached my flash in order to re-direct lighting the subject from beneath (and with less intensity).
The result is a better-lit approximation of how this tree vaguely reached from the darkness as though a ghostly apparition of branches.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 8.13 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.