Blog Post #7: Bear in a Tree

One day I was walking around campus with my camera in hand. Rocky's campus, to me, is absolutely breathtaking in the fall. I was really wanting to take some pictures of the fall leaves, but I was running into a couple of issues. At that time, only a couple of trees had changed color, and of course those trees were right in front of buildings. I was wanting to take photos that afternoon, so I decided to look around me more closely to see if there was anything I could capture.

There were some flower bushes that I tried to take photos of, but at that point they were starting to wilt and not look as pretty as they once were. I tried to take pictures of the leaves that were colorful in the trees, but the sun was to bright behind them and washed out the photos. Even after I tried messing with the photos in Lightroom, they still weren't coming out great.

Then, I saw a bear in a tree. Not an actual bear up in the tops of the trees, but rather in the bark of a tree nearby Eaton Hall, leading up to Tyler Hall. Some of the bark from the tree was missing toward the base of it. Whether it naturally fell off or was ripped off by something, I'm not sure, but the shape of the bare tree exposed kind of had a bear-like silhouette. I could see the two ears and the shape of the head, and the rest of it could be the large lump of a bear's body.

So, because this caught my attention, I took a couple of pictures of it. Even though it's kind of an odd subject to take, I enjoyed it. It made me wonder whether or not other people could see the bear on the tree, or if I was extra imaginative that day. Today, I took one of those "bear in a tree" photos into Lightroom, altered it to some degree, and this is the product I ended up with:

ISO 1600 | 35 mm | f/4.5 | 1/1250
Contrast +10 | Clarity +20 | Vibrance +20 | Saturation +10

The coloring of the bare tree, to me, really helps the idea of a bear in the tree come through. In addition to the basic edits I made to this photo, I used the spot removal tool with the heal option to take out one bright round object from the background of the photo. The bright spots help camouflage the fact that cars were back in the distance, but one spot was so bright that it distracted from the foreground. I also used the graduated filter to darken up the mid-ground and background as the lighting was relativity bright and the reflection from the cars was adding more light to the picture.

The Bear in a Tree, as I like to call it, isn't the most exciting or unique picture, but I was glad to have found something somewhat interesting to take a picture of while walking around campus one day. I just hope that the weather of Montana decides to bypass fall and go straight to winter. While it would be cool to play with capturing shots that time of year, it would also be nice to get more pictures of Rocky in autumn before the snow comes and dominates campus and Billings.