Baobab Avenue at sunrise

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG HSM, 1/8 f/25, iso 50, tripod. Morondava, Madagascar.

The Baobab Avenue, about 40 km from Morondava (along the road to Belo-Tsiribina), is a spectacular road surrounded by huge baobabs - these trees can grow up to 30 meters, an impressive view. Sometimes they are called the "roots of the sky", because when they are without leaves their branches looks like roots, as if these gigantic trees were upside down, with the roots facing the sky...

We arrived there just in time for sunrise. I quickly mounted the tripod and I prepared the 1DsIII with my preferred landscape lens, the ultra-wide-angle Sigma 12-24mm...I love the immense angle of view of the 12mm on fullframe! In this scene, I like the gradient of color in the sky, from yellow/orange to blue, and of course the baobab created a spectacular foreground. I framed carefully the image to include the water on the right side, because I knew it would have created a "double sun" reflection, and I stopped down to f/25. Such a small aperture is not necessary for depth of field, with a 12mm even at 5.6 everything would have been in focus, but it created the beautiful sunburst. Due to diffraction, the image at 100% is not as sharp as a photo taken at f/8 or f/11, but it is still pretty good, even for large prints.

100% crop from the processed photo

This image is a single exposure; I have not used double exposure nor HDR, even though it would have been easy: in this case, I don't mind the small white area around the sun, it my opinion it gives a more pleasing, "natural look" to the image. If I had chosen to expand the dynamic range, in any case, I'd have used a double exposure merged with layer mask - I never used HDR, the 90% of times it gives very artificial looking result...sometimes I post-process a lot the photos, but as I said in other occasions, for me a post-processing is successful when it is not apparent - if the photo looks clearly "post-processed"...you have to improve your Photoshop skills :-)

After this photo, I have taken many other images, with different compositions and using different lenses. Other than this photo at 12mm, one of my favorite from Baobab Avenue is [url=http://www.juzaphoto.com/eng/galleries/landscapes-madagascar.htm#010384] [color=#BF0000] taken with the 300mm f/2.8[/color] [/url] : remember, you have to experiment! Never stop at the most obvious or "classic" composition, experiment as much as possible, with different lenses and various angles of view!

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