The Making of The Giving Tree [link]


********THIS IS NOT A DIGITAL MANIPULATION********


Took easily over a year to produce the finished result.
Location was about an hour and a half away from where I live. Made I don't know how many trips down there to hopefully arrive on nights with thick enough fog to capture this. Did have nights with plenty of fog but by the time I had everything setup and model in place it had faded too much to get what I wanted, so in those situations I would continue the concept and think about how to try to take it further. I would like to stress that I do NOT feel that this is the finished result, but rather as finished as it will ever get. The conditions that existed in this place to produce this result have since changed and can not be entirely repeated, at least not in the same spirit of the image. Therefor this is my completed result. I am happy with it, but what I had in mind would have blown your mind, well maybe just my mind, but it would have at some point blown somebodies mind. Would have been infinitesimally better than what it is now.

Especially on that final shot my model (Heath, always my model, haha) had to hold DAMN still. You can tell he moved slightly, but you can only tell much on my 30x40 print that I donated to the place dear to my heart, the camp I work at during the summers, which is where I took this shot.

*sigh* My series always tend to forcefully end by no choice of my own. This is the second series I've had that ended even though I didn't want it to. The other one ended due to about 1.3 billion gallons of water rushing down a mountain/hill side

***SPOILER(ish)***
The light is not the sun or anything. It was an old school lamp post with an old OLD school lightbulb that actually produced the colors you are seeing. PS me NOT! One because I hate photoshop (I use photoimpact, check it out here [link]). I find photoimpact to be a more compact program that focuses more on the actual tools that I need and use as a photographer instead of a digital manipulator. I only used the burning tool for like 3 seconds on this shot, would have been easier to do in an actual dark room if you ask me, but thats just cause I love real darkrooms very much (yes even though I almost entirely shoot in digital). The fadeout effect of all the other trees and background was no work at all! Physics did that for me! Didn't have to spend hours in photoshop creating this baby, lol, just 10x as much time making sure I got the ACTUAL shot I wanted, think what you want