The Ginkgo tree is a cultural landmark on Osan Air Base for the Korean people. It now sits on a fairway of the base golf course. Records date the tree back to 1260 AD.
The tree is a highly protected symbol of Korea. When you consider most trees were removed during the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the many battles and wars that have been fought on the penninsula you can begin to appreciate its age a bit more.
Many people do not realize that most of the trees in Korea are here due to a substantial reforesting project carried out after the Korean War. Many of these trees grow in straight lines as that is how they have been planted.
One of my many jobs here is to be the Korean Culture Resource Manager. It entails looking after cultural items such as this and old grave sites and ensuring that construction projects on the installation do not interfere with these items.
We came up with this idea of taking a picture of this tree during all four seasons. The pictures will all be joined together in a collage to document the four seasons and given to people as they depart Korea as a momento of their time here.
Today I went out for the second time to try to catch the tree in its fall glory. One of the challenges of this tree is it has a defensive fighting postion under one of the long branches. I tried to find a vantage point that would show the grandness of the tree while keeping the DFP from ruining the picture. The DFP? Well, it is real and will be used to stop advancing ground troops should Uncle Kim decide to reunify Korea one night.
Not long after I got home I received an email saying an HDR challenge had started. I didn't really have time to go shoot something else so I decided to play with this image. Although this is not the image I will use for the collage, I liked the idea of trying out an HDR with it.
I only took the one exposure of the image, so I was a bit limited. I opened the picture in Adobe Camera Raw 7 times. I then adjusted the exposure from -1.5 to +1.5 stops. I saved each image that I opened using the Save For Web command. This stripped the pictures of all exif data. I then opened the 7 images using the HDR automation and manually assigned the exposure compensations based on how I opened them in RAW.
After that I converted back to 16 bit, played with the levels, the saturation a bit, and used the shadow/highlight control to back the highlights a bit.
I can't say that this image is best for HDR. When I compare it to the single shot I processed I would definately choose the single shot.
Will I win with this photo? Not a chance! Was it fun to play with the computer on a Sunday afternoon? You bet! Am I looking forward to the feedback of others who vote on the picture? Well, that is why I entered it!
Thanks for looking, voting, and hopefully commenting!
~benjamin
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Beautiful image of this tree, I like the moon in the upper right hand corner.
There is a bit of a halo effect around the tree that takes away from its beauty.
I think two thing this image has going against it is that it has all that other stuff behind it (fence, powerlines, other tree, etc.). Also, even though it is a beautiful tree, by itself it doesn't really connect with the viewer - ithout your title, hardly anyone would know that this is a really old tree.
You could experimenting with making images of this tree (or portions, even closeups of it) from all sorts of different angles (for example, laying on the ground under it, really close, from all sides, whatever). You could also experiment making images of the tree with different skies (cloudy, stormy, in the evening, early in the morning, in fog).
I love to walk on sunny autum days in the country, the colours the smells it is a wonderful time of year and this is captured so well in this shot. I would blow this up to poster size and hang it in my conservatory so I could look at it anytime of year. = 10
maybe you couldn't get any closer, but if you were able to then you could have maybe avoided the power lines and fences in the background, which are a little distracting to me.
otherwise, very nice.
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