Fairy Forest
Kazakhstan 2016
The plan that afternoon was to photograph a sand dune at Altyn Emel Park. I knew I didn’t have the strength to carry my gear up the dune so I while I waited for the few people who did have the strength, I photographed the desiccated plant life at the foot of the dune.
It’s funny how you can get interested in photographing something that ordinarily you wouldn’t give a second glance. I shot all sorts of twigs, grasses and scratches in the sand hoping for an abstract that would look good in black and white. Oh, but even here, wandering alone in the desert landscape, with lots of time on my hands, I can make a mistake. I didn’t use a small enough aperture to have the total twig in focus on this shot which of course is the one I like compositionally speaking. There is a small area of the twig that juts toward the lens and it is out of focus.
Was my photo ruined?? No, because I have Exposure X. I did what I wanted in Photoshop adjusting contrast and saturation, then added a blue filter in Exposure X and one of the textures that the plug-in supplies. Voila! I have my Fairy Forest.