Yellowcraigs Woodland

For our annual exhibition in December my friends and I have decided to focus a theme this year - Trees and Woodland. We have visited several areas of woodland in East Lothian and in fact discovered a couple new woods that we had not visited previously. I have only just started to look through my photographs for the exhibition so I have no idea yet whether I will have sufficient acceptable prints for my contribution. 

Yesterday we decided to visit the strip of woodland behind Yellowcraigs Beach. We were lucky that it was a nice sunny day though the heavy leaf coverage at this time of year meant there were only small areas of dappled light. Dappled woodland is a type of image that I have struggled with technically over the years as the contrast in lighting is well beyond the 6 stops that a digital slr can cope with. I have tried bracketing in the past and combining the images with HDR software but only had limited success as even the slightest wind can leave you with blurred areas of foliage. Luckily yesterday the wind was minimal so I decided instead to use the in camera HDR setting and was pleased with the results. Also I was able to see immediately whether there were any blown highlights which could be dealt with by using exposure compensation on a subsequent shot. As the overall light levels were low and I wanted on the whole to have reasonable depth of field some of the exposures during HDR were quite long and this tended to drain the battery as the camera then had to use its own algorithms combining the images but I had a couple of spare batteries with me. Unfortunately my Canon D6 can only do HDR with jpegs so there is some loss of quality but with a bit of post processing I found could bring the images alive with a bit of mid tone contrast. The image I have chosen to blip is one of the few wide-angle shots that I took as it includes a greater area of dappled light.