I'm starting to fall a bit behind on my PBasing (both posting and viewing) so even though I haven't felt inspired to write up commentary of late I'm going to push myself to get at least one up. (I find that this tends to be an "ebb and flood" thing too. Just like PADing itself, sometimes it flows freely, and at other times it feels like a feet-dragging chore, annoyingly. I'd be happier if my muses didn't keep taking annual leave.)

In the wee small when I arrive at the local hub train station for my daily trudge to the city, I often notice this tree which is backlit by what appears to be some form of sodium lamp on the Railway Institute building.

(The building apparently used to serve as a library (amongst other things) for the railway workers who were once based at the steam engine maintenance workshops that were near here in the days of yore. It was the centrepiece of a novel that was written by a former local writer a couple of years back. The building now functions as a community hall.)

I always liked the way the light lit up the leaves and thought that it would be good PAD fodder. On this occasion I had driven to the station and had the tripod in the boot and thought "why not?"

Part of the reason why not is the dynamic range between the light and the night time shadows. Another is that it's just not possible to hide the main light behind a branch so that you just have the illumination. This therefore calls for HDR (this is a 7 shot composite), which did a pretty decent job on the branches but no matter what I tweaked I couldn't overcome the posterisation of the light. It's a tad less noticeable when resized for the web, but it's still there.

The inclusion of the street light and the tree in the background was intentional; I wanted the contrast between the white light and the golden light and to form a line through the image connecting the two light sources and echoing the fence line. That worked pretty much as I intended. However I'm a tad more ambivalent about the nearer street light right on the right hand edge of the frame. It probably doesn't matter and does give some context to the lighting of the tree in the background; I'm probably just overthinking it. As I said, sometimes it flows, and sometimes it's a chore.

I may come back and have another whack at this subject later in the year.