Daily Photograph, November 12

© Brad Mangas
This is a picture I took a month back while out driving some back roads of the flint hills. I had been to this spot before and noticed the one foreground tree many times. This shot probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been waiting for the sun to go behind the clouds so I could get some shots from across the road where the color and rolling hills were. While waiting I walked around looking all directions and noticed this lone tree with the cloudy sky might make an interesting image. I grabbed my camera with a wide angle lens 17-40mm on it and set the tripod down about a foot above the ground. When I began to look for a composition I noticed the small tree in the background fit nicely within the frame so a few images where made. The clouds where moving quickly and I made the shots with different cloud positions, I seemed to like this one the best. This is out in the wide open prairie where the wind blows constantly and that is why the trees are leaning. Kansas is also called the land of the south wind and yes these trees are leaning north due to that, like many trees in these parts.
The processing of this was done almost complete in adobe camera raw. In my camera raw program there is an icon for effects, I have totally forgotten about this and if memory serves me correctly it is a group of effects I downloaded some time back and the installed in the acr program. They are called WOW effects and there are about 20 different presets, this is one simply called WOW glow 7. I honestly can’t remember if there are an add on to acr or they came with the adobe camera raw program so if anyone knows you can let me know. I’m going to be giving these effects more of a look now that I played with them and see some of the results.