Alain Briot Fine Art Photography

Mini-Series #1
Arbres sans Feuilles
(Trees without Leaves)

Introduction
This mini series consists of photographs of trees with no leaves. The images in this series were created during a 1 hour session.

I had photographed this location before in the fall (you can see these previous images at this link). At that time the trees had leaves that had just turned yellow and red and I focused on the color of the trees and on the luminescent quality of fall light.

For this second visit I was there later in the year and all the leaves were gone. At first I was disappointed because I was looking forward to creating more photographs similar to the ones I created on my first visit. I expected a repeat of the conditions I witnessed on my first visit but instead I found a totally different situation. All the leaves were gone, there was no direct light, and it was snowing lightly. The light was dim, the ambiance was wintery and the temperature quite cold. IN fact by the end of the shoot my feet were numb from standing on snow for an hour or more.

I considered not taking a single photograph of the trees. While I found them extremely inspiring on my previous visit, this time they came across as uninteresting. While on my previous visit I used a short telephoto lens to narrow the composition to the trees alone, this time I put a wide angle lens on my camera and tried to photograph the entire scene, including the sky and the mountain.

However the light did not lend itself to a wide view of the whole scene. It was getting dark already and the light was not interesting. Running out of options I remembered that on my first visit I used too wide of a lens to photograph the trees and I had to crop the photographs down to get the emotional content I was after, namely an immersive experience of the trees themselves, an effect I achieved by removing all the elements that gave an indication of context, leaving only the trees, using a tight framing, to achieve the effect I was after. the framing tight

This reflection made me realize that I could try mounting my longest lens this time and see what I could compose with it, zooming deep into the trees for a tight cropping, both horizontal and vertical, so I could create the final image in tech camera instead of having recourse to cropping later during conversion and optimization.

The result is the mini-project you see here. During processing I decided to do two color variations for this series, one with the white point slightly veered towards a slight blue tint and the other with the white point slightly veered towards a yellowish tint. These two color choices were arrived at because I could not decide which of the two colors I liked the most. Each expressed a different mood and together these two moods represented my feelings for this scene. One, the bluish images, expressed the coldness I felt on my second visit, while the other, the yellow tint images, expressed my memories of the warm light present on my first visit.

it took me about an hour to capture these images.

Arbres sans Feuilles #1

Arbres sans Feuilles #2

Arbres sans Feuilles #3

Arbres sans Feuilles #4

Arbres sans Feuilles #5

Arbres sans Feuilles #6

Arbres sans Feuilles #7

Arbres sans Feuilles #8

Arbres sans Feuilles #9

Arbres sans Feuilles #10