Moody Branch MazeRestful Deliberation

A simple one today. Yet so complex. A maze to get lost in ...

Several fairly active months of running and other sports, then a week of slacking, couple weeks of vacation spent on a road trip, another lazy week of resting, and then a denial of losing the edge, an attempt to dive right back in full force in a day, followed by another day of futile trying to keep up but being forced to admit a different but slower approach will be needed.

An evening on the couch looking out of the window following the branches of a still bare maple tree. Not completely bare, just still devoid of leaves, yet, full of helicopters. Those could be seen in a color photograph but not really in a black and white. And color here would not demonstrate the point, the mix of simplicity, yet endless complexity of the branch system of this maple tree.

After many minutes of quiet observation I could no longer resist. Off to my feet I went again, reached for the camera and tripod, and headed out to search for a vantage point as similar to the window view as possible. No, I did not succeed. It started to rain and since I needed to tilt my camera and lens steeply up I left that composition for another time and kept searching for an alternative from a dry place. I wanted a frame with a variety of branch thickness yet with nothing too dominating the frame. A frame with just about equal balance throughout.

As pointed out above, while shot in color, it was intended to be black and white from the beginning to put focus on the structure, the maze, without distractions. Overexposed by over a stop to render the cloudy sky as a blank background to further aid simplicity, bringing back the true blacks during the black and white conversion.

Different paths lead to different photos. Some are more about their contents, some about the mood. Here, I've shared a story about how I got to this photo and what I tried to depict - a feeling of relaxation, resting, and getting lost in the maze and in thought.

Have fun finding scenes matching your moods!

Equipment used:

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm Nikkor Lens, Manfrotto tripod (055MF3; replaced by 055CXPRO3 with the convenient Q90 column) and Manfrotto Ball Head (496RC2), SanDisk Extreme 32GB SD Cards, Nikon Capture NX2, Nik Collection Silver Efex Pro 2.

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