The story of 11 Trees or Practice what your Preach

I mentioned previously that I have been involved in photo critique for many years, but doing it on Weku, in public and in writing, makes it for me much more of a commitment that it ever was in the past. It is as if verbal photo critique is not so permanent as doing it here - just because it is not written down - not fixed in a blockchain!

In the past it was a You say I said... but now it is a Look what you have said.

Back to my photography of the day...

If I ever in the past told you that less is more, then please forgive me, today I realised how difficult it is to make it less.

You all know by now that I love photographing trees. Today is Sunday and we went to the Xianhu Botanical Gardens. The name for Sunday in Chinese is "星期天" (Xīngqítiān), and if you do a direct translation it could mean "heavens" day.

Now, being a tree lover, I can declare that today was Heavens Day for me.

We used the local bus to take us up the mountain, rather than doing the 30-minute hike ourselves. On arrival, I saw a small footpath leading us away from the normal road and as expected, I decided to explore the photographic possibility of this small footpath.

The right choice!

We found these strange looking old yet young trees. It is almost as if it is Bonzai trees grown in the wild. They are all really small, but their trunks look as if they are really old. Many of them do have fresh young branches that are about 3 to 4 times the size of the old tree trunk. I obviously could not resist, I spent more than an hour walking around and photographing them. I think some of them I may have photographed more than once, as they looked quite different from different angles.

Now I must admit that today is not only Sunday, it is also 11 November, which, in China is known as Singles Day (11/11), and looking at it from a commercial perspective, it is very much that same as Black Friday in the USA. And I could also not resist the temptation. I bought the Loawa 9mm lens specifically to be used for my infrared photography.

So all these trees are photographed in Infrared with my newest toy.

Being photographed in infrared also triggers my creative side to go overboard with my post-processing. Please keep quiet if you do not like my post-processing...

As I could not make up my mind which ones I love the most, I decided to show them all.

Click on any photo to see a larger version.

Tomorrow I will be back with another Photo Critique Session