Don't know why...

... there's no sun up in the sky...

[finished version on my [url=http://www.blipfoto.com/entry/1388926]Kinda Horrigans[/url] journal]

Oh yeah, I do - it's because the weather's been really weird today. And yet again - zero time for photography other than a quick snap on the way home.

However, you can't beat a good 'lone tree' when the weather's doing weird things, so this'll do. Pre-shutter, I used f/9 as a good 'in-betweeny' aperture which would let in enough light in rubbish conditions and allow me to keep the ISO down to 400. I also spot metered for the sky so that I didn't lose the highlights in the clouds which attracted me to the shot in the first place.

Then, the main bit of processing was with the RAW file. Warmed up the tones because this was actually taken at sunset and I wanted a bit more drama in the sky. Then, blacks up to +27 to darken the clouds and left the exposure etc alone. Reduced the noise. Then opened in Photoshop and processed the shot again, this time dropping the blacks back to about +5 because I was losing too much details in the trees otherwise. I copied this version onto the first version and used a layer mask to reveal the dark sky and the bits of tree detail I wanted as well as a little more detail in the foreground without losing the moodiness of the sky.

To finish, a new layer set to overlay blend with a 50% grey neutral fill in order to dodge and burn the foreground a tad more and make sure that the blend between the two RAW files wasn't noticeable. Flattened and saved.

Tip of the Day:
Plaing about with the white balance of your RAW file is great if you want a particular mood or tone (as with warming up the shot as with this one)... but to really control your white balance, the grey card trick explained in a little article called Get your white balance right in seconds is great.