After a week when temperatures across the UK have hovered above a sweltering 30C/85F, I found myself longing for the chill and fog of early spring, and revisited a shot which I captured at the centre of Richmond Park in early April. On many mornings I'd hoped for calm conditions that would bring heavier fog, and before this particular sunrise the low wind speed and near-freezing temperature near the Pen Ponds created fog so dense that, for a couple of hours, visibility dropped to about 20 metres. As the sun finally crept above the woodland and created various shades of orange and pink on the horizon, I came across the bare branches of an oak tree, and next to it the remains of a broken tree trunk, part of which now lay on the ground. Something about this scene captivated me, so I stopped to capture it.
The image is a blend of seven bracketed exposures, and proved to be a fun editing project because of the contrast between intense foggy light around the sun and deep shadows covering the trees and foreground. I began by blending my exposures using luminosity masks, bringing up visibility of the tree trunks while toning down brightness around the sun. I then refined my own masks in order to select and intensify the fog in the background. This was achieved by duplicating the blue channel in the Channels Panel and using a Levels adjustment to increase the channel's contrast between Darks and Midtones, effectively removing the trees and grass from the selection. After extracting the highlights around the sun using a selection from my Brights luminosity masks, I was left with a selection of just the foggy background, where I blended in my brightest exposures using a combination of linear and reflective gradient masks.
Colour-grading the image was very straightforward, as the mixture of early-morning blues across the landscape and intense warm tones in the sky only needed a little emphasis. Using Colour Balance adjustments with Apply Image as a layer mask, I gave the midtones and shadows a colder finish, and targeted the brighter area around the sun to increase the reds and magentas in the highlights. Setting two low-opacity Colour Lookup adjustments to Soft Light, I then used the Foggy Night preset for the foreground and the Soft Warming preset for the sky.
Using Nik's Colour Efex Pro, I brought out a little of the tree trunks' texture using the Detail Extractor filter, and at the same time softened the detail in the sky using the Sunlight filter, which helped to bring out the hazy glow across the scene when I'd captured it. While I thought that viewers' eyes would gravitate to the sun emerging between the tree's branches, the tree and the trunks among the fog were what drew me to the scene, and I felt it was important to try to emphasise their weathered texture and, ultimately, their "character". There was something hopeful about the colour spreading across the horizon as the sun rose, but at the same time something poignant about a scene that seemed to tell a story of nature's brutality and illustrate how certain things, once broken, can't easily be healed or repaired.
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