The wind, the rain, and the ocean sometimes do a wonderful job to produce some very interesting erosion patterns in the driftwood. This large stump had been hollowed out form the middle. I squeezed myself into the middle of this stump with my wide angle lens to get the feeling of a dragon coiled around me. I loved the way that the root in the middle looked like a dragon’s head (1) that was looking out to the sky. I wanted to give the dragon something to look at so I brightened the sky so that it would appear as though the dragon was looking out to the sunset (2). There were going to be a couple of issues with the photograph though. I wanted to keep everything in focus from the wood 10 cm in front of my lens (3) to the island 5km away on the horizon (4). A wide angle lens will naturally help keep more of the frame in focus but I also stopped down my aperture to f/10. The second issue was the huge dynamic range that I was dealing with. The sky and the background was very bright and the foreground was in deep shadow. No one exposure could take in that variation in brightness, not without some manipulation. If I had exposed for the shadowy logs, the sky would be too bright, If I exposed for the sky the logs would be black. I shot a medium exposure and that leaned towards the highlights and took it in to Nik HDR. That program does some serious digital voodoo and pulled the detail out of the logs.

-Russell Berg