Irish Town Park Early Spring

It was early spring and I was eager to go out again. There's a period where there's no snow but everything looks bland. I was still determined to get something. So I went to Irish Town park multiple times without success. It's so difficult finding compositions in the wood. You have to think about isolation but there are so many distractions and the example below is a perfect example of potential but doesn't work because of too many distractions.

I tried to get this tree many times but this is the best I could do. I love it's on a small island. The water helps to isolate the tree. I stood back as far as I could and zoomed in so it would create a thinner depth of field. I tried being careful with the trees around so it's not behind the main subject. The same thing for that tree stump in the water. I tried my best but there are too many small branches around and that makes it look messy.

These shots were taken with my Fujifilm X-T3 + Fujinon XF55-200mm. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

For the edit, I have a radial filter for the tree to increase highlights, whites, texture and clarity. For global I decreased the shadows and increased vibrancy, lifted the blacks in the tone curve, moved the yellow hue to more orange and applied some color grading. A kind of mustard color for the highlights and a blue for the shadows. In the calibration tab, I increased the blue saturation. This is something I always try and the results can be surprising. I then brought it in photoshop to remove the most annoying distractions.

156mm 1/30sec F/5 ISO160

From my previous walks, I remembered a part where the leaves were silver-blue when wet. I couldn't find a composition. The bottom of the bigger trees had moss on them and it looks really good with the blue leaves. This time I climb on the hill to get another perspective and I finally found a composition.

You can see the walking trail on the right side. I actually scared some people because they only saw me at the last minute. I have my tripod really high so I can point down. I took a shot with the polarized filter but unfortunately, it was less sharp because my focus wasn't good. Fortunately, I could achieve a very similar effect in post.

I bought the highlights all the way down. I increased the texture and clarity a bit. My usual lifted blacks with the tone curve. I wanted to keep this blue and green as much as possible so in the HSL tab, I've adjusted the purple and magenta to the blue side. I increased the blue saturation a bit and lowered the luminance.

I have a few local brush adjustments to fix more of the highlight issue and to darken the 3rd tree on the left. There's also one for the highlights on the trees using the luminance mask. Increased the whites and warmer temperature. There's a small gradient filter on the bottom to darken the foreground a bit. Same as the other picture, I brought it in photoshop to remove as many distractions as possible.

67mm 1/4sec F/5.6 ISO160

I think I went to this park 3 times before getting these shots. I was getting annoyed but I was determined to get something even though it wouldn't be great. I'm positive that you can get a picture anywhere and this was my challenge. Sure it's not comparable to what you see from the big Youtubers or what you see on 500px but if you can get something decent that you are happy with, you won at photography.