26 Feb 13. Easy walking distance from our house, and just past the westerly end of my grandparents former property, is a stand of trees, the type of which I'm not certain, other than they are very light colored when their leaves are no longer on the branches. The entire time I was commuting while building this house I kept telling myself as I passed them by twice daily, that I needed to try and capture them in some form. A little over four weeks ago it struck me that taking them leaf less might make for an interesting shot and so one afternoon when we had sky that would allow for such (not raining), I paused the SUV long enough to jump out and take a few shots. Looking them over I found I liked the composition, but not the color or lighting. But I had an idea that converting the image into a high key B&W might work, and in fact, as you by now are likely guessing, I think it did. The conversion to high key dropped out any chance for strong blacks, something that I feel would make the image stronger, but in reality there were none to begin with. The image as it stands can, or could, be manipulated quite a bit, especially easily by applying an overall tint to it, or it could be rendered as a painting, or even converted to a negative image. All of these approaches would be reasonably interesting, and I'd actually like to see it converted to a painting, so, for those of you who are painting some of these images, how about showing me how you interpret this one. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 7.1.

26 Feb 13. Easy walking distance from our house, and just past the westerly end of my grandparents former property, is a stand of trees, the type of which I'm not certain, other than they are very light colored when their leaves are no longer on the branches. The entire time I was commuting while building this house I kept telling myself as I passed them by twice daily, that I needed to try and capture them in some form. A little over four weeks ago it struck me that taking them leaf less might make for an interesting shot and so one afternoon when we had sky that would allow for such (not raining), I paused the SUV long enough to jump out and take a few shots. Looking them over I found I liked the composition, but not the color or lighting. But I had an idea that converting the image into a high key B&W might work, and in fact, as you by now are likely guessing, I think it did. The conversion to high key dropped out any chance for strong blacks, something that I feel would make the image stronger, but in reality there were none to begin with. The image as it stands can, or could, be manipulated quite a bit, especially easily by applying an overall tint to it, or it could be rendered as a painting, or even converted to a negative image. All of these approaches would be reasonably interesting, and I'd actually like to see it converted to a painting, so, for those of you who are painting some of these images, how about showing me how you interpret this one. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 7.1.