Lone Red Tree

So there's a golf course near my house and they have these red trees along with the property. I was passing by around 4:30PM and the sun was getting a bit low. It was back/side lighting the tree and casting a nice golden light. When I came back home, I decided to go and try it but because it was so cloudy, I had a very small window to get a shot and I missed it.

The next day was mostly cloudy but I could see a break in the clouds. It was also windy so the clouds were moving fast but I decided to go because there was a chance.

As you can see the tree is fairly close to the road so I didn't have much foreground to play with. The 50mm was perfect for the distance. At first, you may feel a little embarrassed because people will look at you but they'll forget you in 2 minutes. A bit of embarrassment for an experience plus a picture you can look back on forever is worth it in my opinion. 

These were shot with my Fujifilm X-T3 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

When I first looked at the images on the computer I was shocked by how little glow and warmth from the sun there was in the picture. The before and after pictures have the same whitebalance of 4500K. So I added color grading in the highlights. There's a lot of local adjustments for the tree and foreground. I increased the shadows and contrast for the foreground, which made a huge difference. For the tree, not much, a bit of clarity and texture. The HSL has a lot of changes so I'll just summarize. When playing with the orange, it was changing the foreground and the tree so I wanted to find a balance. I didn't want the long grass turning red so I moved the orange more to the yellow and increased the red saturation.

50mm 1/640sec F/4 ISO 200

I decided to shoot this at F/4 because I wanted to isolate the tree a bit more. There's a lot of detail in the trees in the background and that could distract your focus if they would be sharp. Shooting at F/4 on a 50mm lens ensures that the tree is sharp and the background trees are just getting out of focus. Also because it was windy, I had to shoot at ISO 200 to get a decent shutter speed to freeze the action.