Ghost Tree
© 2009 Martin Liew Photography
Here's another night photograph I made on that same night with the white guardhouse in our last blog post. It stood strongly within the Seletar Air Base premise along the roadside, about a hundred meters away from the white guardhouse. Not too sure if this dead tree is still around.
It does look creepy and spooky as it stood against the dark night sky and has an open field in the background. Street lights hardly cast upon the dead tree in whole. The lighting effect you see here in the photograph was created using a portable manual strobe. At aperture f/8.0, I opened the shutter for 36 seconds. Within this short time, I fired the strobe twice to the left side of the tree and once to the right side, in full power. As the flashlight fell off shortly and quickly, the light could only reach the foreground and a little further mid-range of the crooked tree branches. Leaving the ones further behind in silhouettes. Hence it has this pop-up three-dimensional effect. Somehow or rather the lighting made this dead tree looks "alive".
There are quite a few soft spots/bokehs in this photograph. You can see that the bottom left corner thick tree trunk or branch has this motion blur effect. The middle part foreground tree branch is out of focus. The only focused area is the main tree trunk covered with ferns. It's all due to the wide-angle lens I fitted on the taking lens of Shanghai TLR camera. The lens is meant for normal camcorder usage and its thread size fits perfectly right on the TLR taking lens. Focussing with this lens is challenging. This night photograph wouldn't be made possible without this wide-angle lens.
I'll be posting and sharing another two night photographs which I made on that same night with this ghost tree. Do come back. If you have not subscribed to my blog, do so for new updates. Thank you for your time.
Good night.
