I decided to go in a little more abstract direction for this week’s photo. While I was up on the Icefields Parkway last week, the bright green colour of the new leaves on the trees was really grabbing my eye. I also really liked the way the white bark of the tree trunks stood out against the backdrop of green. After attempting a more literal approach at first, I was finding the image still looking too busy and lacking the emphasis I was looking for. I decided to pan the camera vertically during the exposure to blur the leaves and detail to simplify the image even further and make it really just about the lines and colour. While this is definitely a more artistic interpretation of the scene, I feel quite satisfied with the image in that I was able to capture and emphasize the elements that drew me to the scene in the first place.
As far as the technical details of the image go, it was actually pretty simple. I used a polarizer to cut the reflections on the wet leaves and saturate the colours, then after manually focusing, I played with a few different shutter speeds to get the motion effect I was going for. This one ended up being at 1/3 of a sec with me making a pretty quick dropping motion while holding the camera. The keeper rate on these kind of shots isn’t very high, so after working out the exposure it was just a matter of trying a bunch and getting one I liked.