Long Time No Post - Autumn in Madrid

Ventas Autumn — Autumn in Madrid

Long time no post...

1/2000s f/1.2 ISO 100 - Nikon D750, Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — *1/2000s f/1.2 ISO 100*
*- Nikon D750, Nikkor 50mm f/1.2*

I spend a lot of time wandering the streets of Madrid with my camera in hand, often going home without pointing my camera at a single thing. I mean, I enjoy shooting in cities, but eventually, shots of looming, grey buildings underlined by car headlamps streaking down a road become a bit samey and static, and my lack of creativity in an urban environment quickly takes its toll and my enthusiasm to shoot starts to wain.

Nature, on the other hand, changes. New compositions arise as leaves start to fall, the harsh summer spotlight softens and shadows lengthen, but most excitingly, it changes its colour. Autumn is a smorgasbord of optical opportunities and despite living in the barren plains of Spain, I had no intention of missing out.

Madrid isn't a city known for it's spectacular foliage, but it's certainly not devoid of colour in autumn. So I've spent as much time as possible wandering through the city and it's most popular source of fresh oxygen, Retiro Park (or Parque del Buen Retiro), looking for some eye catching compositions that are hidden for the rest of the year.

A critique I have of my own photography is that I often foolishly try to fill the frame with too much clutter, failing to focus on a single subject. It's a bad habit that I've carried with me over from travel photography, where I would try and capture as much as I could, more to preserve a memory than produce a striking image. So for the last few months I've been trying to narrow down the focus of my images, by finding subjects that are distinctly separated from their surroundings in one way or another.

This could be down by finding objects isolated in space, like a lone tree standing apart from any other, or perhaps the subject could be separated from its surroundings by its colour. The style that I have been trying to practice this past month is that of luminance, trying to find subjects that are illuminated differently to the rest of the scene.

Fire Tree of Retiro

The shot that demonstrates this best has been the Fire Tree of Retiro image. I don't know why it was catching the sunlight quite so differently in comparison to its surroundings, and I certainly don't know why there were wavy lines in the dirt leading straight to it. But in combination they work so well to lead the eye through the corridor of dark sentinels, straight to a glowing orange focal point.

Processing

To post process, I used Adobe Lightroom to make sure that the bright leaves were heavily contrasted against the dark tree trunks and branches, as well as adding contrast and clarity to the wavy lines in the foreground. I used a luminosity mask in Photoshop to restore some of the highlights from the brink of clipping without reducing the contrast elsewhere in the image, and brought a bit more warmth to the image to compliment the warm tones of the foliage. Finally I added a rather heavier than normal vignette to further focus the viewer's eyes towards the centre. There result it and image that I'm pretty proud of, and if I had a portfolio, I'm sure it would make its way in there!

It's been a pretty nice autumn for photography, and I think I've taken a few images from it that I'm more than happy with. Here's hoping it's a picturesque winter too...