Splayed lighting on neighborhood tree

Back in 2011, when I was still living in Indianapolis, I became keen on a tree I came across on the southwest end of Garfield Park, which was very close to where I had lived. 

I'm sure I photographed the tree — and yes, I referred to it as “The Tree,” — on several occasions. It had a proud stature without being extraordinarily large, nor plentiful of branches or garish.

While out on a morning walk in the neighborhood this week, I had a similar experience after spotting a selective amount of sunlight highlighting an extraordinary rust-colored trunk and branches (see photo leading off the post and a closeup below). 

The tree’s wood looked to me to have the texture of a Crepe Myrtle, but those trees’ wood normally is a dull gray. I later did a deeper research dive and determined that the tree is an arbutus andrachne, whose trunk bark is smooth and exfoliates in summer, leaving a pistachio green color before turning into this color in autumn.

The tree was in the front yard of a home about two-tenths of a mile from my house. It wasn't so much the tree that caught my eye, but the light that was striking it. I used my iPhone 13 Pro to capture these pictures.

I was immediately was thrown back in time to all the lessons I'd had about the importance of light in photo composition. Many skilled photographers will tell you that no matter what a person points a camera at, what he or she is capturing, first and foremost, is light. 

I don’t quite agree with that, but I do agree that lighting is extremely important. A photographer has to be conscious of his/her light with every shot. Almost as important is background; the more solid and less cluttered, the better. 

When I did my walk along the same route the following day, there were heavy clouds offering no sunlit highlights like the first day. But I took a few pictures of the tree anyway to use for comparison (below).

A tribute to Garfield Park's tilting timber

A couple days ago, I uploaded one of the pictures you see in this post to my wall on Facebook. In the accompanying note, I half-joked that Garfield Park in Indianapolis would be wise to promote its handful of weirdly shaped trees to draw more visitors, not that the park is lacking patrons.

I'm sure any heavily treed area has its share of odd tree formations. But Garfield Park's niche might be that people, if they had access (online or somewhere in the park) to a brief printed guide and/or map, could find, view, enjoy and photograph a select number of odd-shaped treess, and do so within a relatively contained area and within a short amount of time.

The tree featured prominently in this post was a new "find" for me when I was out shooting Dec. 21. By its size, it's obviously been around a while, so somehow I've either missed it or didn't go near it on the visits I've made there in the past few years.

I add it to my growing list of odd-shaped or otherwise distinguished trees (the others appear at the bottom of this post). For those of you interested in finding and seeing this one, it's on Conservatory Drive, south of Fire Station 29, along the west rim of the curved hill that sledders use after snowfalls.

To view a full gallery of shots from the Dec. 21 shoot in Garfield Park, visit my site at SmugMug.

Next up: Other bridges in Garfield Park.

Above and next several below: The "new" tree (new to me, anyway), beginning above with a perspective shot as it appears to someone southbound on Conservatory Drive. The monochrone version immediately below also entailed erasing/cloning out some branches of the tree adjacent to it and to the left from this view. You see that tree in the other, normal-stature tree in the frame below the monochrome shot. 

Above: The "new" tree, on the west rim of the curved sledding hill, is in the far background -- almost straight ahead -- of this shot, taken from the peak of the Ticklebelly Hill bridge over Pleasant Run on Conservatory Drive. 

OTHER ODD-SHAPED OR 

DISTINGUISHED TREES IN GARFIELD PARK

This photo dates to Jan. 8, 2005, and was taken following one of my most favorite snowfalls in recent memory -- the type where the snow sticks to branches and buildings. This tree is near the bend, or nook, of the "L" shaped Garfield Drive, greeting westbound pedestrians and motorists on the Drive's south leg as the road turns north.  

Above and below: Two additional views of the conifer pictured previously. These two, which look north and slightly east toward the residential area east of the park, were taken Dec. 24, 2004, not long before the other.

Above: The former "V" shaped tree at the north end of the park with the so-called Ticklebelly Hill in the background. This was taken in February 2006; the tree has since fallen or been felled, although a good share of the downed trunk and branches remains at the site. 

Above and below: Two views of unusual ornamentation on a tree in the picnic grove at the south end of the park, not far from Pagoda Drive southwest of the MacAllister Center for the Performing Arts. The one above was taken in February 2011 on the first shoot in which I experimented with high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging; the one below about a year earlier.

Above: This tree might be the most unusual of all in the park. It is situated along the pedestrian path outside the west end of the Sunken Garden and just north of the pedestrian bridge over Bean Creek. This photo was taken in October 2010, and I devoted a post to it at the time. Click here to see other pictures of the tree from different angles. 

Above and next two below: These trees fall into the category I'd call "distinguished trees" in the park. The first (above), a monochrome conversion of a silhouette composition, is the one I dubbed "The Tree" in a post in February 2011. It is situated in a grove at the park's south end, not far from Southern Avenue. The one immediately below, another HDR rendering, is a stately maple that greets visitors to the aquatic center and motorists, cyclists and pedestrians along the Pagoda Drive hill. Unfortunately, this tree has been slowly dying over the past few years. I'm glad I caught photos of its colorful orange and yellow leaves while it was still relatively full and healthy in 2005; it has not been the same since. I include the final tree, a victim of storm damage, because of its interesting post-damage shape and white trunk. 

Serendipity, popcorn salt, 'The Tree'... and other to-die-for silhouettes

Last night, photography serendipity fell into my path a second time in recent weeks, and I owe it to popcorn salt. Well, sort of. Here's the story:

There are a lot of people who make a practice to have a camera with them at all times, because fleeting photo situations can present themselves at any time. You have a shot to record those moments in pictures if you have a camera with you, but they're gone forever if you don't. I had a camera with me (Canon PowerShot G12) the evening of Jan. 30, when I returned from attending a concert at the newly opened Palladium in Carmel, Ind. As I neared home, I noticed some amazing contrail patterns in the sky, and I grabbed shots that I probably would have missed for lack of time to run home and get a camera.

That was on my mind as I started a walk to a grocery store last night. That I had a chance to do a walk at all was very unusual for a Tuesday evening: I usually am at work during the week, but this week, I happened to be off. I took the walk primarily to stretch my legs and enjoy fresh air, but I figured I might as well use the opportunity to stop at a store and buy some popcorn salt I've been wanting to get for some time. I'd gotten about 20 yards out the door of my house when I remembered that I hadn't packed my camera. I'd bought the G12 three months ago, and this situation was one of the reasons why -- to have a quality compact to grab quickly and pack comfortably for possible spur-of-the-moment shots. So, I walked back to the house and got the G12, and went on my walk.

It was on the return trip that I decided to stop, first, at the relatively new Bean Creek bridge in Garfield Park in Indianapolis, and work with some shots of reflections in the water and of the linear patterns on the bridge fencing and baseboard.

Finished with that, I resumed the walk home along the main pedestrian path that lies on the east side of the MacAllister Center for Performing Arts. As I passed the amphitheater, I looked to the right, the west, and that's when I first saw the silhouette and sky color spectacles you see represented in the images in this post. The first captures of the western horizon I grabbed by positioning the G12 at the top of the amphitheater's iron-wrought perimeter fencing. Then I squatted as low as I could get, slipping the G12 through a fence opening and angling the built-in lens upward. With most cameras, this position would have made it impossible to accurately compose and frame because there would be no way to view the scene with the camera inside the fencing -- unless a photographer elected to do it blindly. But the G12 has an articulated LCD panel -- one that can bend and tilt at any horizontal angle -- so tilt it I did. With the camera almost at ground level and pointed upward, I could easily compose the shots I wanted. For much of the shooting from this vantage point, I struggled to avoid including the amphitheater stage in the frames. Then I had a change of thinking on that. I decided to integrate a portion of the stage overhang into a frame, and I've included that one in this post.

When I finished there, I scurried around the amphitheater's south perimeter fencing to get on the west side of the amphitheater, where I grabbed my next series of shots. From here, I no longer had the structure or the fencing to work around. I even lay on the ground, trying for dramatic upward angles. The G12's built-in wide-angle lens was an added tool for that this evening.

When I finished there, I thought I was done. I resumed the return-walk home. As I approached Pagoda Drive to cross, still buzzed by the neat silhouettes I'd already gotten, I looked west to check for vehicular traffic, and that's when I noticed "the tree" at the far southwest corner of the park, the one you see at the top of this post. My heart raced. I allowed an oncoming car and RV to pass safely before crossing the pavement and scooting closer to "The Tree."

When I finished there, I thought I was done for the night (wait, I just said that, right?). What more could there possibly be? Well, how often do you get a chance to grab a shot of a full moon over your own house? Yup. I did. Unfortunately, the moon was drifting through a lot of cloud thickets, so I had to wait a bit. But I did finally get it.

Oh yes, and there's still more. Tuesday night marked the first time I turned to Lightroom (version 3) to handle my primary post-processing work. Normally, I've used Photoshop (Elements 7). I was never comfortable using Photoshop's burn and dodge tool, and therefore never dabbled with it. Tonight, however, thanks to a Lightroom walk-through demo last week by photo club member Dave Wensits, I felt equipped enough to give Lightroom a try. I managed to recall most of what Dave showed me of the primary editing tricks, including the dodge and burn brush. Thanks to that, I was able to do justice to the detail you see in the cloudscapes in this post.

One thing I did not remember, however, was how to apply editing tweaks on one image in Lightroom to all the "like" images in the batch. Editing RAW or DNG files in Photoshop, it's easy to do -- you simply highlight the images you want to include with "like" editing tweaks before you do them, and poof ... it's done. Doesn't work the same in Lightroom, although I'm sure there's a way to do it. Consequently, I had to edit each image individually last night.

Back to the images ... The monochrome conversions of some of these color images are quite striking. I'll post those either tomorrow or Thursday. I'll also post the Bean Creek shots in a future post.

To see a complete gallery of images from this shoot, follow this link.

Above and below: The G12 offers a built-in high-dynamic range (HDR) feature that grabs three pictures of the same scene, each with different exposure values, then in a matter of 5 seconds after the third and final image is captured, melds highlight detail in the images to form one, detail-optimized JPEG (you can't use the feature in RAW format). Not having a tripod with me (camera stability is a key element when a shooter employs multi-shot HDR photography), I rested the camera on top of the fencing (though I still had to hold onto it) -- then held my breath to grab these shots using the HDR feature. The benefits? Notice the smooth, beautiful sky blues and the golden brushes in the cloud detail closest to the horizon.

 

Above: The first of several shots where the camera is nearly touching the ground. For this one, I decided to include the front overhang of the MacAllister Center for the Performing Arts (right). You can almost make out the amphitheater seats in the foreground.

Above and below: The camera again is nearly touching the ground here. The two compositions vary to include more trees (above) ... and more sky detail (below).

Above: A somewhat normal shot from this position, in that you see the full extension of the trees. In the foreground, you can make out the seats in the amphitheater.

Above and below: Shooting while prone on the ground. The portrait (vertical) shot above adds a deliberate tilt for creative effective. Not sure it works, but ... I wanted to give it a try. 

Above: A portrait orientation of "The Tree" shot with the sun immediately behind the tree.

Above: A portrait orientation of "The Tree" shot, with the sun positioned slightly left.

Above: Composing "The Tree" shot with the sun positioned to the right.