Late this afternoon it suddenly became rather dark and stormy and for about two minutes - before it was hidden by the rapidly forming cloud front - the sunlight took on a luminous almost haunting quality. This was the view looking south from my front door, 300 metres across a field of winter wheat to a neighbours house right at the edge of the forest. I took four shots seconds apart and by the fourth, the mystical quality of the light had faded and gone. I liked this even more in B&W than in colour so it's my today's offering for B&W February.
Beautiful capture and love how you caught the light that reflects the tops of the trees and surrounding trees. You are the Master of B&W to me. I can tell most of your shot because they are so magical and brilliant.
The lighting in this is quite stunning. You've really captured layers of texture in the land, and then into the sky. And the variation in color on the trees almost looks like infrared. Beautifully done.
@taffy@brigette Hi Taffy and Brigette - thanks so much for your nice comments. I did very little to this image other than cropping the foreground some and removing some powerlines from the sky area. I was going to use it for my Diary shot for today and then, just for interest, I did a quick conversion to B&W and was blown away by the result. It does look IR but the light is completely natural and it only lasted for a couple of minutes - I was lucky enough to be outside, camera in hand.
What I like is how the trees seem to tell the story of light going to darkness. I saw this as I was preparing my post and that is what I noticed in a quick glance.
@blueberry1222 Thanks Krista but this is an ordinary colour image, converted to B&W in LR and with hardly any processing - it's the remarkable quality of the light that gave this effect.
The light is so terrific that, for a moment, I wondered if you had processed this as an infrared shot in LR, but the other trees didn't look that way. That one tree, left of center, is almost glowing! So many excellent textures and layers here, to make the b&w effective for showing them off.
The lighting is very bold, beautiful capture!
FAV