I learned a lot by shooting and editing this image.

Shot on a very bright blue sky day, I only made it because my tour group wanted to do it. When I came home I found that I could push this outside of the 'sunny blue sky day' in the edit.

I realised that one of the skills I must learn is to be able to 'see' what's possible in the edit, whilst looking at the literal. And the only way to do that is to gain experience in editing, and to push your edits as far as you can, to find out where the boundaries are.

For instance: I would ordinarily skip a sunny blue sky afternoon, and write it off as a no-go for me. I now know that I can work with this kind of light, and push beyond it sometimes within the edit to convey something else entirely.

Having that kind of knowledge to my disposal is vital. Knowing how much latitude you have to work with allows you to choose your source material better.

So this was one major learning event for me. I now know I can shoot in blue-sky sunny days and sometimes get something useful out of the edit session. Even though the original shot may show very little potential…..

On a different note, I’d also like to say that I have also learned that when I think I am finished with an image, sometimes I realise later on that I was only half-way there:

I think the main ‘feature’ of this image is the gradual tonal shift in the shadow - brighter towards the edge, and darker towards the centre. This helps pull the eye back into the middle of the frame and away from the edge of the forest. This was the final thing that I applied to the edit : it was not immediately apparent when I had first thought I had finished work on the photo, and only came to me after living with the image for a week or so.