This photo was taken by Magnus L Andersson in (/, ) using a Leica M Monochrom (M9) with a Leica Macro-Elmar-M 90 mm f/4.

It’s interesting to try to do the unexpected since this photo would most probably attract more attention in color as a shot at sunset with saturated green, yellow and red colors.

Note, the leaves at the upper right corner of the image due to me missing their existence. However, I don’t feel they ruin the image and don’t want to get into removing objects from scenes. Moreover, the focus was, most probably, unintentionally set on the second row of trees and to me, this was a good idea since it added a special feeling to the image.

It’s always quite difficult to take photos when there are huge contrasts in the picture, but in this case, I only lost the minor parts at the rear end of the scene.

The choice of lens was most probably just the one at hand, but it turned out quite well even though it looks like the focus is not on the first row of trees.

Since my interest was in the geometry of the scene, I went for the Rollei Retro 80S (Affinity) emulation with large underexposure of the lower half of the tone curve and the inverse of the upper half. However, by an additional auto-toning of the negative with Exposure (+0.36), Contrast (+7), Highlights (-57), Shadows (+57), Whites (+50) and Blacks (-30) I was able to obtain the wanted result. As often, one may ask if this two-step process is not overkilled by first applying a film emulation and then partly mitigate it by toning. My take on this is that if we assume I used a film camera I wanted the characteristics of the film, but failed to achieve it and had to compensate for it in the darkroom.

The choice of a 6 x 7 format was to emphasize the geometry of the trees.

This image can only be found at this site.