Favourite Image Series – Dragon’s egg nest

There are images that you love because they are of places you wanted to go to and you finally got to take photos of them. Then there are photos of places you see all the time, and you want to make the image stand out from what everyone else does with it. Then there are photos where you want to get creative and do something that you think no one else will do. You combine images and let your imagination take over.

Today’s image is one of the last ones. I took a photo from a Redwood forest here, and then I added some stuff from some other images to create the image below.

You can probably tell from the header image that the eggs weren’t always in this nest. I put them in the nest. Let me explain.

First, let’s take a look at the image.

I don’t know if people realise that we have some redwood forests here in Australia. Not many, and they aren’t indigenous here. From my understanding, the logging industry was looking for alternatives, so they planted, 3 I want to say, three forests of trees. Two are in Victoria, and there is at least one that I’m aware of in NSW. They planted them, then forgot about them, or so it seems. They aren’t fenced off, and anyone can go and visit them. They aren’t natural, so they were planted in rows and look more like a plantation rather than a naturally occurring forest.

One of them is just outside Warburton here. I haven’t been there for years, but the last time I went, someone had been making these circular nest like structures. Apparently, they were tied up in the trees, but the rangers cut them down, no idea why. I had to take photos of them, of course.

The first time I processed the scene,  I just lightened up the nest. It isn’t exactly the same image, but it is the same nest. I decided to have another go at the image, and I don’t know why, but I blurred the trees in the background to make them look like they were going up and up.

Finally, I sat down some time after that, as I had been wondering about putting something in the nest. I had to think on this quite a bit because I had to work out what I was going to put in it. Then a thought occurred to me, the boulders on Moeraki Beach in New Zealand. I will add some photos to the final gallery for those who haven’t seen them.

It wasn’t easy to do, and I had to spend a lot of time working out the lighting. The shadow from the sticks took quite a bit of time to get right. The image is a composite, and I love it. I have always been very proud of this one.

Doing images like this is something I really like doing, but I am really afraid of doing it too. Trying to get it to work in my head is very different to the outcome. I think maybe I just need to have a go and see what I get. What do you think?

I’m going to finish it off here. I’m including a gallery with this image and others so you can see the progression of the image in a basic way. The boulder images are not what was used in the final one, however, you get an idea of what they looked like.