I don't often show my personal work on the website, but this is an image I've been wanting to shoot for a long time, and with the current economic situation, I decided to share this little project.

I've driven past this house every day for the past 15 years. It sits a couple of hundred yards from the freeway and the last resident was a truck driver... I don't know him but I would see a tractor trailer parked in the driveway for a week or so a few times a year and I often wondered about his story. A few years ago, it went empty and has been abandoned ever since. This tree has been dead for a long time, and I always thought it had an eerie feel. Today was the first I ventured off the road and walked to the house.

This image is an HDR composite of 9 separate exposures. I basically wanted something that had the tonality of pulled large format tri-x printed on grade 5 paper... I wanted to retain the shadow and highlight detail in the tree and accentuate the grain in the wood -- but I didn't want it to look like an HDR, so I was careful in post.

Lighting was simple -- I waited for the right time of year for the sun to be in the right place to cast these shadows on the front of the tree just before sunset... I used an SB24@1/16 on each exposure (below sync) to skim across the shadow on the right and highlight the tops of the pieces of bark. F/16 1/2 thru 1/500. I used a polarizer to darken the sky -- I probably would have tried a red filter if I had one big enough to fit my sigma 10-20 mm (@10mm).