lightopia
Jessup Path Birch
The Jessup Path traverses a marshy area between the Park Loop Road and Dorr Mountain.
Since the day had started with rain but by mid-morning was merely overcast we decided to photograph in a wooded area. I suggested the Jessup Path because I had been there in the summer and found the area to be quite interesting since it was flat (unlike many of the popular Mount Desert locations) and the woods were open with very little understory vegetation. Originally the plan was to take the path starting at the south end from the Nature Center parking lot but a trail crew was working on installing a bog walk (the path is usually very wet and the walk will make it easier to access and prevent trail widening). Instead we looped via the Stratheden Path to where the Great Marsh fire road intersects Jessup. From there we were able to go South a little ways along the path.
I setup the tripod so that very little of the sky was included in the picture, I didn't want to have blocked up regions that would require multiple extractions from the RAW file with multiple layers and complicated masking in Photoshop. I also decided this was a good picture to have the smallest depth of field possible and isolate the trunk by making the background out of focus, which is unusual for me.
The final image is made up of two extractions from a single RAW file. The first was for the birch trunk, the highlight contrast was increased very slightly to improve the separation of the mid-tone grays from the white of the bark. The second was for the background which was made slightly darker than normal. The two images were placed in separate layers and masks created so that the subject birch trunk is lighter than the out of focus trunks in the background. The trunk of the fallen birch on the left was made slightly darker so that it was less distracting.
Jessup Path Birch
The Jessup Path traverses a marshy area between the Park Loop Road and Dorr Mountain.
Since the day had started with rain but by mid-morning was merely overcast we decided to photograph in a wooded area. I suggested the Jessup Path because I had been there in the summer and found the area to be quite interesting since it was flat (unlike many of the popular Mount Desert locations) and the woods were open with very little understory vegetation. Originally the plan was to take the path starting at the south end from the Nature Center parking lot but a trail crew was working on installing a bog walk (the path is usually very wet and the walk will make it easier to access and prevent trail widening). Instead we looped via the Stratheden Path to where the Great Marsh fire road intersects Jessup. From there we were able to go South a little ways along the path.
I setup the tripod so that very little of the sky was included in the picture, I didn't want to have blocked up regions that would require multiple extractions from the RAW file with multiple layers and complicated masking in Photoshop. I also decided this was a good picture to have the smallest depth of field possible and isolate the trunk by making the background out of focus, which is unusual for me.
The final image is made up of two extractions from a single RAW file. The first was for the birch trunk, the highlight contrast was increased very slightly to improve the separation of the mid-tone grays from the white of the bark. The second was for the background which was made slightly darker than normal. The two images were placed in separate layers and masks created so that the subject birch trunk is lighter than the out of focus trunks in the background. The trunk of the fallen birch on the left was made slightly darker so that it was less distracting.