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Was trying to do my first HDR without too much success so tried a different take on it... What do you think?

Nice capture and HDR post-processing. I would comment a few things, as my personal opinion:
1 - The photo seems a bit crooked. 3 degrees clockwise rotation would straighten the tree and create a more pleasant view.
2 - I would crop the left part of the photo away as it creates quite a distracting bckgrd.
3 - You can further stress the effect of the sun light by Photoshop > Filters > Distortion > Lens Distortion > Vignetting toward the center of the image.

libertyterran wrote:1 - The photo seems a bit crooked. 3 degrees clockwise rotation would straighten the tree and create a more pleasant view.

Probably not the best advice I've seen. This image was shot with a wide angle lens. Ultra-wide, it would seem, and as a result there's quite a bit of distortion that needs to be accounted for before one can consider this sort of thing.

Look at the fence on the rh side of the image, and look at the right-most fence post - the one right on the edge of the image. It appears to have a distinct lean towards the left from vertical. If you now look at the next two major fence post as your eye moves towards the left, you will observe that the angle of apparent "lean" decreases as your eye moves left.

The decrease is really very significant: now look at the other side of the tree, near the left edge, where there's a lamp post that is leaning ... towards the right! Pull the image clockwise and you'll decrease the lean of the fence posts but increase the lean of the lamppost.

Perhaps it may be better to observe that there's a couple of other vertical posts just to the left of the tree's trunk, above the roots. These are pretty close to vertical, and probably represent the best guide as to whether or not this image is straight.

While the tree does seem to have a slight lean towards the left, the tree itself would be a very poor guide: look again at the rh side of the image, through the fence at the first tree from the right: it's leaning towards the right, and against the apparent direction of the fence's lean. Which of those two trees would be the correct reference point? Neither of them would have grown with reference to any sort of a true vertical, and thus I'd say leave that aspect of this image alone.

This is what I meant .

The reason why I commented the image seems crooked because the tree is the main subject of the photo, as composed by the photographer. At the first glance, the viewer's eyes tend to be drawn straight into the tree (not the fences or the lamp etc.). And it is actually leaning too much to the left.

Thanks for your comments guys, I shot this with 17mm end of my 17-85 and this lens is notorious for distortion as well as CA esp at the wide end... Unfortunately I don't think I got enough shots for HDR (only 3 with automatic bracketing)..Maybe next time...

libertyterran wrote:The reason why I commented the image seems crooked because the tree is the main subject of the photo

I fully understand what you said, and what you meant.

My point however is that you have no frame of reference whatsoever that tells you that the tree should be absolutely vertical. Further, life and just a weeny bit of observation tells us that, left to their own devices, trees have a tendency to not grow 100% vertically, and indeed we have irrefutable evidence of exactly this within this very image, where we see the tree in the background, that I referred to earlier, that has clearly not grown perpendicular to the ground.

So my question to you is, absent any factual information at all as to what actual angle this tree might be growing at, and absent any creative reason to make it straight, why in the world would you do this? "Just because you can" seems like the only reason on offer, but it's hardly valid.

gstark wrote:So my question to you is, absent any factual information at all as to what actual angle this tree might be growing at, and absent any creative reason to make it straight, why in the world would you do this? "Just because you can" seems like the only reason on offer, but it's hardly valid.

It's probably valid or invalid depending on how an individual views the photo. "Why in the world would you do this?" Do you think the photo looks a lil better after the tree is straightened up?

sorry Gary, but i also think that the image looks nicer with the tree straightened up.

it may not technically be straight, but i don't believe that photos have to be technically correct to look right.

that said, i like the processing of this photo, the rays of light create a strong part of this image and show up very nicely.

libertyterran wrote:Do you think the photo looks a lil better after the tree is straightened up?

No I don't. Not a little better. Not a lot better.

Not better in any way, shape or form.

And I don't think that it's added anything to the image, and that, really, is the real issue.

To me that's doing PP for the sake of doing PP, and that's the wrong reason.

Thanks for comments guys. I am pretty free with photoshop so don't mind either way. Speaking of photoshop the light rays are added (not sure whether it adds or subtracts really... probably not a strong enough image to be good in the first place) On the plus side, the tree is still there so I can try again later...