Every morning, I drive down Lafayette Street and marvel at the great trees the line the center of Star of the Sea Cemetery.  This year, the trees seem particularly healthy owing to the snow melt from Winter and the gradual warmup of Spring.  As such, I had been determined to photograph them but decided that I needed a foggy day to capture them the way I wanted.

On this Thursday morning, we had a thick fog roll in and I thought the conditions might just work.  I headed to work a bit early and stopped at the Star of the Sea cemetery to assess the light.  Turned out it was just about perfect and I set about trying several compositions to showcase the majesty of this tree.  This view was an instant favorite and I decided to convert the image to black and white to allow the viewer to concentrate on the textures of the tree and gravestones with the perfect mood of a foggy day in a cemetery.

How this image was created:

In order to isolate the tree and still maintain the landscape orientation I had preferred to include important nearby elements, I had to angle the camera up.  Doing so with a wide angle lens means that I ended up with a keystoning effect that I knew would have to be fixed later.  At home, I started with Adobe Lightroom to do some basic adjustments to the RAW file and then spent time with a program from C1pro to correct the keystoning effect.  I then opened the file in Photoshop where I removed part of a tombstone that had been cut off due to the effect of the keystone correction and did the black and white conversion using Silver Efex Pro.  I then inspected the final image at 100% to insure no trash appeared on the ground, no ‘dust bunnies’ could be seen in the sky and saved the image back to Lightroom.