I had the day off and woke up at 5:00 AM. Sunrise is at around 6:30 AM and according to the forecast it was going to be a partly cloudy morning before rain moved in later in the day. So, that left me enough time to get out to the wildlife refuge and hike up to an area that I wanted to photograph with the early morning sun breaking through the clouds. But as I arrived at the refuge, I could see the sky well enough to know that there would be no chance of the sun breaking through the clouds. I was there and ready to hike anyway, so I hiked up to my spot and figured that I’d find something to shoot.

The image below is the area I had planned to shoot sunrise from. The sun rises over the ridge to the left this time of year.

My original idea was wildflowers on the hillside with the sun rising over the ridge in the distance. But as the sky was gray and foreboding, I decided I would try to find some shots that I could later edit in either black-and-white or reduced color saturation with lots of contrast. This is not my usual style as I like photos with rich, warm colors but it is good to try different things I suppose.

With the occasional burns that the wildlife refuge does to protect the habitat from over-growth and reduce the risk of severe wildfires, there gets to be a lot of weathered old juniper stumps amid the long grass. So, I framed up a few scenes with these old stumps. I figured the texture of the tree stumps would edit well in a low saturation image. Nikons seem to render greens slightly saturated out-of-camera, which is great for landscapes, but I often find myself knocking the greens down a little in editing. In this case I isolated the landscape and globally desaturated the colors almost to gray. I considered complete black-and-white but didn’t like the way it looked. I wanted the viewer to realize the color of the scene but not be distracted by it.

I think the reduced color saturation visually highlights the grainy stumps that would otherwise be a bit lost in the sea of spring-green grass. I also masked the old stumps as objects and refined the texture so they’d pop a bit more. The ability to select objects for masking is a recent addition to Lightroom and I am finding it a handy feature. You brush over the object that you want to select and it generally can identify it though you may have to go fine-tune the selection a bit.

The photo below is another tree stump across the valley from where the above photo was taken, but it points at the same hill. I held the camera down low so the stump is contained within the landscape and doesn’t disturb the horizon. In editing this photo, I reduced clarity in the background landscape quite a bit and it really makes the stump stand out. Not sure if a gnarly old stump is a great photographic subject, but it portrays the mood of the morning quite well. Imagine listening to a sad Willie Nelson song while looking at the photo.

All the photos in this blog are shot at 35mm focal length. I often constrain myself to 35mm because I like this focal length for landscape and not having a zoom ring at hand forces me to pay more attention to my framing. For instance, when taking the photo above I experimented with standing in multiple places to decide how big I wanted the stump to be in the frame. The photos are all un-cropped, so hopefully they all have a consistent feel with respect to perspective as well as editing.

Below is a dead tree that I shoot sometimes. It sits along the hiking trail at the top of the ridge. I like shooting it because it is easy to separate from the rest of the landscape. You can see that I was able to get all of the branches isolated within the sky. It isn’t easy to find a tree like this. On this thick gray sky day, the silhouette of a dead tree seemed fitting. If only I could have coaxed a couple of vultures to perch on the branches, it might have been perfect.

I never regret going for a hike even if I didn’t get the light I planned on. It was a Wednesday morning and I had the refuge to myself and I enjoyed working a few different scenes even if the sky was just a gray soft box. I have had some mixed-emotion stress in my life lately and this morning seemed to have worked with my general mood. It’s good to get out in the quiet of nature with only the wind and birds as your soundtrack. I find it helps me sort out my thoughts as well as exercise my legs.

Everything here shot handheld at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge with a Nikon Z7ii camera and Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.8 S lens. Thanks for reading.