The other day I wandered around the very dry wetlands in the Central Perkiomen Park behind my house with no particular intent. I found a lot of shadows, which are reproduced here a lot darker than they actually were. Except for the last, these are all five-exposure, handheld HDR images. The animals (you may need to embiggen the images to see them) were inserted with generative fill. The final image is a composite where there was enough camera motion that I could not quite get them to line up so I arranged them, yellow-boxed them then surrounded the assemblage with content-aware fill because generative fill did not work well on this.
Wow! You guys really are dry. We're looking almost the same here in our part of PA. I think we still have more leaves on the trees though ... I enjoyed the generative-ly filled animals. Out of curiosity, why did you reproduce the shadows darker? To increase the contrast of light/dark? Hope you are doing well, Andrew!
The darker shadows added drama. With the darker HDR exposures, I could still retain some detail that was impossible with the single "normal" exposure. Many of the ash trees have no leaves because they are dying due to an ash-borer infestation. Three on my property have already been taken down because they could have fallen against my house. Because this is a protected wetland in a county park and falling trees are no obvious danger to anyone, they are not being removed and are being allowed to die in place. You can see one at 45 degrees in picture #1 whose fall was caught by another tree.
You achieved your goal with the shadows. That's what it felt like, but just wondered your thought process. My daughter and her husband have a tree cutting business. They've experienced the Ash tree issue now for awhile.
Hi Andrew. I thought I had responded to this earlier but perhaps I just pushed to one side awaiting a better time to do so.
I enjoy your creativity and pushing the boundaries to add new ideas. I did indeed have to enlarge the images and find those hidden animals. I think your forcing the viewing to search is relative to the nature of........ well nature!
Do you get snow in your neck of the woods (excuse the pun)? I think some of these may stand out with the bare tree limbs set against a white backdrop.
Sorry to hear about the Ash trees. We are being hit in Vermont also, with many of the trees being cut down as a precautionary measure. I have one in my front yard that I've just paid $150 to have inoculated against the Emarald Ash Borer - it's supposed to last 2 years, so we'll see how that goes.
Say hello to Harry for us. He hasn't appeared in any of your walkabout photos recently, so I hope the old guy's doing OK.
Our daughter has a new apartment in Philadelphia and I am thinking of gifting her a very large print to hang on her nearly blank living room wall for Christmas. This was in mind when I worked on these. Getting the scale right was important so the animals could not appear closer to the camera than would be realistic.