Photowalk 10 - 100 Acre Wood

I'm not normally a fan of taking photos in Woodland, but this early morning stroll around 100 Acres Wood, north of Fareham, near Wickham, has changed my mind.

Having the place virtually to myself I just wandered on (and off) the trails, looking for some interesting shots, the weather was kind (if the sky boring), and I'll be looking for some good forests to walk around in the future.

As usual, I brought my Qstarz GPS Tracker along for the ride, so you can download a Google Earth .KMZ file than contains my track and the pictures.

(Please click on the pictures below to go through to Flickr to see the bigger versions.)

It was another overcast day - the sky was just a blanket of grey - so the perfect opportunity to take some shots where the sky is not really in the frame. In the woods it surprised me the lack of light - I brought my tripod along, but when shooting hand-held I had to bump up the ISO setting to avoid camera shake.

All of the shots in this set are HDR's, apart from the single flower, I find it really helps to bring out both the colours and details, but maybe the saturation goes too high on a few of the shots....

When you're walking through a forest, it can be hard to pick out subjects for your images - there's just so much going on, and it's right in front of you, it can be quite claustrophobic.

For this shot I tried to make the subject the forest floor, I tightened down the aperture for a large depth of field, rested my camera on the ground, and used the shutter delay timer to reduce camera shake. I tried to really emphasise the difference in colours in post-processing.

I had to get off the real trails in the forest and onto what I guess were animal runs - there were plenty of deer tracks, but I didn't see any.

The strange looking trees caught my attention. I had to use my tripod to make sure I'd get decent exposures with no blur, and the HDR post processing brings out more of the spirit of the place.

A Photowalk wouldn't be complete without a Panorama, but this is one with a difference. It's a HDR panorama. I've tried two different techniques, and the one that seems to work the best is to choose the three (or more) exposures of the main subject, and put them through Photomatix. Get it looking the way you want, then save the settings. Now batch process all the exposures using those settings, leaving you with your HDR Tone Mapped TIFF's. Then get Adobe Photoshop CS3 to Photomarge them into a landscape and do your final editing.
I've tried to do it the other-way round (with Photoshop creating 3 differently exposed Pano's) but often there's large differences even if you auto-align the images before exporting to Photomatix.
The only disadvantage is that you're trying to set the HDR up just by looking at part of the picture.

I really like this capture of a dead, fallen tree. I tried to lighten the path in Photoshop to emphasise that it had fallen across the trail, and of course there's my trade mark Flaming Pear Melancholytron vignette...

I guess the image looked better in person than what I ended up with. I was walking along a trail and saw this colour off to the side in the distance. I trampled through the undergrowth to see this bush with bright flowers amongst all this green, sitting between these two trees. Looking at it now it may have been better if I'd moved round a bit and had a tree to one side in the foreground, then the bush, then the other tree, and maybe from a viewpoint closer to the forest floor.

The funny thing was that I was taking this shot using a tripod, and I had to carry it over my shoulder as I was walking around, and these two riders were coming down a bridle-path to one side, saw me, and one said:
"There's a guy over there with a rifle!"
I quickly called back that it was a tripod, but I must have looked suspicious crashing around in the undergrowth with what looked like a firearm slung over my back...

A close-up of the bushes I mentioned above. I opened up my aperture to f3.5 (the largest my camera goes to) to create a small depth of field. It's just a shame that there's some withered (or unopened) flowers to the right, and the line of the leaves is a bit muddled on the left. These vivid colours are achieved by converting the image to LAB in Photoshop, then applying the image using soft-light, and the lab channel.

This was another strange discovery - a clearing where all the trees had these climbers wrapped around them. Eerie.

A final macro shot - resting my camera on the logs and roughly trying to get the right framing. I need a bean bag to protect my camera from getting damp, methinks.

When you're looking at these images (thank you!) remember that although there's only nine here, I probably took about two hundred wandering around - a hit rate of about 10%, so the next time you're out and about remember that the vast majority of your photos will not be keepers. My solution? Take lots!

I learned on this Photowalk that even in places you thought previously it would be hard to get decent photo's its worth persevering, you never know what you might come up with. Also that as soon as you get out of direct sunlight a tripod is a necessity if you want to avoid camera shake.

Thanks, Rob.