Found this palm tree forest right off the road on our way to Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch. We weren’t going to stop initially but I thought that it was so cool how symmetrical everything was and I really liked how the trees looked all lined up with each other. I’m not exactly sure what they were growing all these pine trees for to be honest but I didn’t really care either. I just though it was nice to look at. There was a fence around the whole forest that blocked off people from going in so I ended up taking this picture from the edge of that fence. We just pulled over in the car and I set up my tripod and shot away. I wanted to get the right angle so I could show just how aligned all these trees were. They all even looked about the same size. It was really cool. Throughout this cross-California trip with my sister, we encountered some really cool things. One day we were driving through the mountains and hit the worst fog I had ever seen. You literally couldn’t see five feet in front of the car, it was nuts.
Because it was so bright when I took this shot, I had to take a few extra exposures so that I could get the full range of light that I wanted in the final picture. I find that thinking about the end product when you are taking pictures is very important because you need to know what exactly you need to be able to complete that goal. I used my recently adopted technique of luminosity masks and combined the light values from the other exposures. I edited the whole photo in Photoshop CS6 and did adjustments here and there with Nik Color Efex Pro.
