National Arboretum: Knotted Tree

[SirMike1983]

A natural oddity! This tree apparently knotted around itself as it grew. The picture below is a close-in view of the knots (pun intended) in the tree's trunk. It's basically photographic gawking...




Pardon the size, apparently my photo site has added a 1 meg cap to pictures... blah!

[dbutler]

I'm sure it's nice, but it's simply too small to really get any appreciation. Maybe you could link it some other way?

[SirMike1983]

Same picture, another try.



This was one of two versions of the tree. The second centered the knotted tree and did away with the right hand side near tree. This one just seemed more like a natural "walking through the woods and happened upon..." to me.

[Anbesol]

im sorry, im not a huge fan of black and white - i think it only has room in a very select few photographs. but this is the most blatant misuse of black and white i have ever seen. The subject and the backdrop lend themselves SO WELL to color. But, all that is lost in teh black and white. I give it a strong thumbs down, but i'm really interested in seeing what the color would look like...

[dbutler]

How are you doing your conversion? What software package do you use?

I don't know that it wouldn't work in b/w. Just that there isn't enough tonal range to tell for sure. It looks like you may merely have hit grayscale to convert. Try maybe a different conversion and see what you get.

If it really doesn't work, I'm going to think it's because it's just not focused enough on the intended subject. By that I mean that the tree is still kind of not big enough in the frame to command the attention it deserves. I would try a few different crops and see if any of them can give it more impact.

[SirMike1983]

No software involved here.

It was shot in regular black and white film in a 30's German Camera (all original parts) that doesn't really shoot color well. The film of choice in those days was black and white so that's more or less what the camera does best. Only use of digital equipment is that I scanned it in on an HP PSC office machine. Some of the quality issues may come from that.

The Kine is my main camera (really the only decent one I own) so most of the stuff I do is in black and white simply because that's what the camera uses to best quality.

[dbutler]

Well, boo on me for assuming!

[SirMike1983]

Well, boo on me for assuming!

heh seems like everything is digital now though! In fact it seems like people are dumping off their film stuff.

My girlfriend usually takes the designated color camera along (70s Minolta) and I get the black and white (Exakta). I think maybe I will try a better-quality and slower color film in the Exakta though. I've only tried basic 400 color in it and the results were a bit grainy and the colors seemed to "bleed" into one another almost. Maybe 200 or 100 will do better (both color and b+w).