A Tree Paradise

Last year, we went on an impromptu Pilanesberg National Park camping weekend. Most people go there for wildlife photography but I am not geared for wildlife photography. My nature photography is normally landscapes.

On the way back, about 10 kilometres past the well known Sun City resort and gambling mecca, we passed a piece of undeveloped land on the right which is cleared for some reason, but all the larger thorn trees were left standing in this bare landscape (I think it will become some sort of new development as there are quite a number of these developments in the area).

By the time I realised what I saw, I already passed it and immediately made a U-turn to investigate it from close by. The fence was still visible but run down, so after I took one photo of a tree close to the fence, I noticed another beautiful scene a little further in - and decide to investigate it even closer... But each tree leads to another and soon I found myself running from tree to tree - really running - to capture this unique landscape. It is an absolute rare phenomenon to find these thorn trees without the typical undergrowth of grass and thorny shrubs. It was like being in paradise. It became a race against the setting sun as the infrared photos look their best in direct sunlight.

On the Friday before leaving for Pilansberg, I received my X-T1 back from Fujifilm after they converted it for me on special request to infrared. Like its forerunner - the X-E1 - it is now fitted with a 590nm infrared filter and will spend the rest of its life as an infrared camera.

The Saturday morning, I created a custom white balance using the new (barely visible) green leaves of one of the thorn trees in the campsite - one has to use whats available.

I took these photos using that custom white balance. No post-processing except for fixing skew horizons was done - correction, I had to lighten 2 photos and darken another to get the set to look reasonably the same as all the photos were not taken with the sun at the same angle towards the trees. The first photo was taken at 17:31 and the last photo was taken at 17:48. Sunset was at 17:59.

Why did I leave 11 minutes too early?

This is my entry in the weekly #landscapephotography challenge kindly created by @juliank