Forest Glow | Weekly Photo #93
Hi everyone. With the positive effects of the vaccine rollout starting to show, I’m feeling an increased sense of optimism that we are slowly but surely beating this nasty virus and although by far the most important goal is to save lives, I feel I can now start planning for some Spring and Summer adventures both with friends and family and of course, with my camera! Last year, we were told to stay indoors just as Spring came into bloom and with the UK stay at home order set to be removed on March 29th, I’m now eagerly planning some local landscape and woodland photography adventures in the hope to capture the most vibrant season of the year.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF55-200mm | 82mm | 1/8th Second | f/10 | ISO200
For the majority of my photo outings, I head out alone. Don’t feel sorry for me because, honestly, I’m fine with it and in most cases prefer it this way. I love to meet up with other photographers and talk photography, sharing tips and tricks but to me, the quiet, personal pursuit of a photograph is in fact my therapy and a kind of filter to the noisy and frantic lives we all live. I actually wrote a bit about this in a blog post back in 2019 called Mental Health and Why Photography Matters where I list some of the positive effects, I think photography has on mental wellbeing.
That being said, even when alone I do like it when people approach me, curious as to what I’m photographing, showing a genuine interest in what I’m doing. It can be a great way to connect with local people and just have a nice chat about the local area. For someone like me, always on the lookout for new places to photograph, it can be a great source of local information that only a few people might know about, which is exactly what happened while I was out taking this photo in my local forest. As I was taking a panoramic image of the woodland, a man walking his dog stopped for a chat, genuinely interested in what I was photographing and I could see he had a real passion for the surrounding area. We must have been talking for 20 minutes and he was more than happy to run through a list of places and viewpoints I might be interested in photographing, some of which sounded really interesting. Eventually, he happily went on his way but I was really glad he stopped by for a chat.
I had the camera mounted on my tripod in portrait mode, ready to take a wide panoramic photo of this Scots Pine woodland. With the slightly defused, dappled light casting a warm glow across the forest, I levelled off my tripod and while panning from left to right, took around 12 overlapping photos ready to stitch together later in Adobe Lightroom.
Another great tip when creating these high-resolution panoramic photos is that you can crop them to create multiple different photos while still having plenty of resolution left in the final photo. The resulting stitched panoramic photo ended up being a hefty 80 megapixel and even the cropped version above is 33MP, which is still plenty big enough for me to make a large print for the wall.
Although it won’t come across too well on the screen, here is the original panoramic photo which is best viewed on a larger screen.
Next week, I’ll be posting a night cityscape I captured of Tower Bridge in London last year and if you don’t want to miss it, why not subscribe to my newsletter by clicking on the link below. That way a new story like this will automatically drop into your inbox every Monday so you never miss a thing.
Until next week.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.