The early morning sunlight was spectacular yesterday as it streamed through the trees at Huntley Meadows Park. I tried to capture this phenomenon as a kind of mini-landscape by using my telephoto lens and framing it just as you see in this image. It is a little unusual for me not to crop an image at all, but by composing it this way, I was able to include those elements that I found the most interesting, the light and shadows of the trees, and left out the things that I found less interesting such as the sky. I did include a little strip of grass in the foreground so that the image is not completely abstract.
When I first arrived at the park, the sun had barely risen and there was a lot of ground fog, which made the woods look really mysterious and a little spooky. One of my viewers on Facebook said the image looked like it could be the setting for the witches in Macbeth. The second image was a lot tougher to capture, because of the lack of light and my desire to capture a sense of the fog that was clinging to the ground. There is a slight blur to the image, which would normally be a shortcoming in a photo, but I think it works ok with an image like this one.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Love your more artistic posts of late, Mike! Great to see a variety of subject matters and ‘treatments’.
Thanks, Chris. I was wondering if anyone would notice that I am in an “artsy” mood recently. It has affected the way I have taken some of the shots and even the choice of subjects, e.g. I don’t regularly choose to take photos of trees. There is a creative side of me that I don’t show very much in my everyday life that I am consciously trying to develop.
Great photos, Mike. I like spring-summer-fall, but there is something special about being able to see the light or the fog through the trees in winter.
Thanks, Dan. I think the water was still pretty cold, but the record-breaking temperatures that we have had the last two days seems to have been caused, at least in part, a significant amount of fog. Winter is cool for photographing trees because there are no leaves to get in the way and you can see better the structure of the trees.
very cool