Sunsets & sunrises are amazingly beautiful in mid-South. The wide open lands in Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri with large trees and beautiful farms, barns and pastures can keep you occupied for hour at a stretch with so many possibilities for composing some great images.
I would see this see every day I drove home from work. It stood in the middle of what I could imagine is a cotton field. One day I took the time to take a diversion to locate this tree. It was winter and the sun was almost on the horizon. The sky was a combination of red, orange & blue. The sight was irresistible.
After driving through this back road & that, keeping an eye on the general direction of where I saw the tree from the freeway, I finally found it. However, it was too late to get the colors. I checked out the weather forecast for another rain-free evening & made it in time from work to set myself up for a couple of gorgeous sunsets & the tree.
The picture above was taken with a very-wide angle Nikon lens and used a combination of circular polarizer and gradual ND filters. The perspective was difficult to control due to the enormous size of the tree.
A while later, I did a few black and white images of the same tree. As I said this is a huge tree and this time I had 2 sets of lenses with me – one being Nikon’s 14 – 24 mm very wide angle AF-S lens and the second one is Nikon’s perspective control (or PC lens) manual focus lens. As for filters, this time I only used the gradual ND filters.
The weather was very cloudy and there was no chance for any sun to come out. So I opened up the lens to about f/8 and used the filters to control the exposure latitude as much as possible while shooting. The picture above was done with the wide-angle lens with about 5 secs of exposure time.