Very often rural roads pass through some gallery forest (those that usually grow around river basins).... This type of forest, when old, offers a lovely view from the roadside. This is especially true when the dry season has advanced and much of the vegetation has lost its foliage and wilted...
01-📷 / 50 mm| 1/1600s | f/5.0 | ISO 500
02-📷 / 50 mm| 1/2000s | f/5.0 | ISO 500
Most of these old-growth forests are within private lands. However, I am addicted enough to taking pictures, to occasionally pass under one of the barbed wire fences and get close to the threshold of these wooded areas. I especially like to look into the forest in the mornings, when it is very foggy and the shapes and colours take on an exquisite visual relevance. These are usually secluded and unguarded places, so I don't think I am at risk of being reprimanded by the people hired to guard these grounds. Moreover, on the rare occasions that this has happened, my camera has become something that justifies my presence there and people, instead of being annoyed, end up being delighted that I am there taking pictures. This is very different from what happens on farmland, which is more prone to theft and more heavily policed.
03-📷 / 50 mm| 1/1600s | f/5.0 | ISO 500
04-📷 / 50 mm| 1/1250s | f/5.0 | ISO 500
This is a nice type of photography and quite easy to do. You just have to get a lens that is bright enough to work with (in my case I used my fixed 50 mm lens) and you will be able to take most of the pictures with a fairly stable set of parameters. Usually the fog has the effect of a "light box" and helps us a lot to take the pictures thanks to the even and well distributed light. For the rest, it was enough to set my camera in semi-automatic aperture mode (P) and expose properly between -0.3 EV and 0.0 EV depending on the characteristics of the elements present in the selected visual plane.
05-📷 / 50 mm| 1/1250s | f/5.0 | ISO 500
06-📷 / 50 mm| 1/3200s | f/5.0 | ISO 320
In a short walk of perhaps half a kilometre through this "wooded threshold" you can take a lot of pictures. But it is also a good place to exercise introspection and spend some time observing nature and breathing in the fresh air of the sunrise. This is one of the "additional advantages" of becoming a fan of taking photographs in places like these, for at the same time one can have exquisite moments of solitude to "listen to oneself being". And yes, I know I'm starting to sound a bit between "mystical" and "crazy" (or at least strange). But many already know me... I can't separate photography from some existential epiphanies!... ;)
07-📷 / 50 mm| 1/2000s | f/5.0 | ISO 320
08-📷 / 50 mm| 1/2000s | f/5.0 | ISO 320
Black & white versions!
And obviously, here are the monochrome versions of these photos for you!.... It's a lovely thing to look at them also in black and white, as several of them have a complex meaning and this is something that - in my opinion - is best appreciated in black and white...
| 📷 01 | 📷 02 |
|---|---|
 |  |
| 📷 03 | 📷 04 |
|---|---|
 |  |
| 📷 05 | 📷 06 |
|---|---|
 |  |
| 📷 07 | 📷 08 |
|---|---|
 |  |
Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!
ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.
"We make photographs to understand what our lives mean to ourselves." - Ralph Hattersley.
Lens: Nikon AF Nikkor 50 mm f/1.8d FX
