Pixiq

One of the most beautiful roads I’ve ever seen is this country lane in Northern Ireland.  It's called Dark Hedges, and I include it in my photo tour to Ireland. All of the people in my groups get amazing pictures here. The serpentine trees form a tunnel that is spectacular at any time of the day, but I find it particularly intriguing and mysterious just before dark.

The key to shooting a scene with a great deal of depth such as this is to capture as much depth of field as possible.  After all, who would want some of the background elements in this scene out of focus? Therefore a small lens aperture is required, and this means that a tripod is essential.  When the camera is on a sturdy support, the length of the shutter is no longer an important consideration in determining the exposure. My photo group set up our tripods in the street and hoped we wouldn’t be disturbed by any traffic.  Once in while we’d have to move aside for a lone car, but for the most part we had the road to ourselves.

The deep blue color is something that many photographers try to avoid by changing the white balance to cloudy or to a higher Kelvin temperature value like 6000 or 7000.  I like the moody blue tones, though, and I elected to use daylight white balance.

I shot this with a 70-200mm lens set to a focal length of 160.  I used a Canon 5D Mark II and the exposure time was 30 seconds. In the extremely dim light of evening, I focused manually because I didn't trust the autofocus function to be accurate for a scene with such low contrast.