Yesterday’s trip to the New Forest was my first photography outing of 2023. However, the weather did not rise to this auspicious occasion and remained dull, Gray and flat all morning.
That meant woodland landscape photography was out of the question so I wandered around looking for a suitable alternative subject.
I came across a mature oak tree, that was covered in clumps of lichen. This I thought might make a good subject, so I started to look around the tree for my first victim. I thought I would take a face down one first, and set about taking the centre image in the triptych above. Once the stack capture was underway, I was looking for others, and different angles when I came up with the idea of a triptych.
Each image is a stack of around 90 separate images taken at f5.6. When staking the right hand image I had an issue with haloes caused by some very out of focus parts of the lichen. This happened because the bottom farthest edge of the tree is actually way beyond the lichen causing the lichen in that shot to be extremely blurred. The solution was to stack multiple times. So the first stack was groups of 6 images, then the resulting stacks were also stacked and some healing used to reduce as much as possible.
Near the Oak tree was a small ford across the stream behind me, and whilst the camera was working through capturing the previous images, I was looking around. I came across this lichen growing directly upon the sandy soil. Having never seen this before, I decided I had to capture that as well.
And as every club photographer knows 2 is not correct, you must have an odd number, so I needed a third image for this post. As I looked around I came across a rodent skull. I think it may be a squirrel, but i am not an expert so may be wrong. It needs a dentist; one of it’s teeth had fallen out…
