That Wanaka Tree

The Most Photographed Tree in the World?

We went to the beautiful town of Wanaka for 2 days, not to take photos, but to see my wife’s brother who has been living there for years. I’ve never really been interested in taking photos of the Wanaka tree. I’ve seen some very nice images of it, but for some reason the location just didn’t excite me much.

But since I am a photographer, and I’m sure you’ll understand this, I couldn’t say no to at least visiting the tree and taking a quick shot or two.

That ‘quick shot’ actually turned into an hour of shooting. I placed my camera down, composed the shot, and kept my camera still for an hour, switching between short exposures and long exposures.

When the clouds started moving quickly, and separating from the rest of the pack, the scene suddenly shifted from okay, to very interesting, especially with my 10-stop ND attached.

In the end I was genuinely surprised that I came away with an image I enjoyed.

I also had the pleasant surprise of being recognised by one of my newsletter subscribers, Marco Grassi. It’s great to be able to meet some people I’m connected to. My email list is now at around 70,000 subscribers, and being able to actually meet some of these people gives me a real appreciation for how many talented photographers I have the good fortune to be connected to.

Anyway, I’m glad I went to shoot the tree. I know some photographers worry that a location has been over-shot. But personally, I think that just because a location is popular with photographers doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the experience of shooting it too. And, in the process, add a beautiful image or two to your portfolio.

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How I Created The Image – Before/After Post-Processing

Workflow Explanation – That Wanaka Tree

This image was created using Raya Pro – The Photoshop Plugin.

This image is made up of 3 exposures – two long exposures and a short exposure. Most of the image comes from one 88 second, long exposure. The colourful clouds in the top right of the image come from a long exposure shot shot a little bit later as sun the was setting. This was 335 seconds long. Since the tree was moving a lot in these long exposures, and therefore blurry, I blended in a short exposure where the tree was nice and sharp.

To blend the long exposures it was a simple case of matching their exposures and simply painting in the cloud to the top right. However, the B+W 10-stop ND filter leaves a fairly strong pink colour cast, which I quite enjoy. The short exposure didn’t have this warm cast. I could have corrected the warm cast in the long exposures to match that of the short exposure, but I wanted to keep some of that pink cast in the final image.

Instead I matched the colour of the short exposure with that of the long exposure blend by using the 4th teachnique you see in this colour correction video: Photoshop Secrets 17: 5 Ways To Color Correct Beautifully (Even Remove Strong Casts). Once the colours and brightness were matched, I created a manual luminosity mask using Raya Pro’s Manual function and made an accurate selection of just the tree in the short exposure. Then I shifted the edge of the selection outwards, and feathered it. I used this selection to blend in the tree from the short exposure. Then I cleaned around the edges of the tree and made small brightness adjustments.

From then on I corrected the colour significantly using the ACR method in the video above. I really wanted to restore some of the blue sky, while retaining some of that warm pink cast.

I used Nik Color Efex’s Tonal Contrast to add some dynamic local contrast throughout the image. And I added a few contrast adjustments to stretch the histogram somewhat. I pulled down the midtones dramatically with a Curves layer to create a deeper mood. I then used a Darks 5 luminosity mask from Raya Pro to pull up and soften the shadows slightly.

Shooting at f/22 meant that every little bit of sensor/lens dirt showed up in the picture. I used the Sensor Dust function in Raya Pro to reveal and then remove these pesky marks.

To soften and deepen the mood a little bit more, I created an Orton Effect layer using Orton Effect Bright in Raya Pro. And I finished by creating a custom vignette that you can learn to do here: Quick Photoshop Secrets 9: Awesome Vignette For a Moodier Scene.

Finally, the image was sharpened and resized using my free sharpening tools, which you can download here: Quick Photoshop Secrets 16: Perfect Sharpening & Resize for the Web

As always, I hope you found this useful.

Jimmy