Tan­gle of win­ter branches II

Here’s another detail-oriented image taken dur­ing our recent spell of grey, over­cast win­ter days. As I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, when the light is dif­fused so evenly by the low, bright stra­tus clouds that are com­mon over cen­tral Alberta in the win­ter (espe­cially the past few weeks), it’s often these close-up, detail ori­ented com­po­si­tions that I find work best.

I don’t com­monly con­vert images to black and white, and even less often do I process them quite as heav­ily as I have here. While the con­trast was fairly strong to begin with, I’ve “crushed” the darks all the way down, and bumped the back­ground sky all the way up, to really empha­size the some­what abstract pat­tern of the tan­gled branches, accen­tu­ated by the lin­ing of snow and frost. Per­haps I’ll also post the orig­i­nal ver­sion as well, and I would love to hear your com­ments as to which you prefer.