At Crystal Beach in Bomoseen, VT there is an oak tree that keeps its ;eaves most of the year well into winter. At sunset the light from behind lights up the leaves and breathes a little of autumn’s golden light back into them.
Just getting a shot of the water with a sunset there is OK, but it isn’t a great composition. The water will look flat and the sides will look empty. You can use this tree, or most any tree, off-center to frame your shot. It adds interest, directs the viewer’s eyes, and ties the whole scene together.
For this shot: I usually shoot this one with the camera vertical. Fill up about 3/4 of the shot with the tree and use it like a border to frame both the water and the sunset. Make sure to include a bit of the ground at the bottom of the shot to complete the lower part of the “frame.”
You can put the trunk on the left side or the right side of the shot.
In warm weather I use this tree to frame the sailboats anchored offshore. If you’s rather have the shot framed on all four sides, then turn the camera from vertical to horizontal and add in the tree to the left of it to frame the boats.
Left, right, vertical, or horizontal – make sure to include a bit of ground at the bottom of the shot. Avoid showing the tops of the trees or they stop being a frame for the picture and just become trees again.
This is the shot with the trunk on the left. If my goal was just showing the sunset, I could have done a bit better by moving down the hill a little, which would have opened up a clearer view of the water and sunset. In this case I wanted the sun through the late autumn leaves. Sunset easily breaks through the leaves and gives a bit of a sun star by peeking through.
This is the same tree but with the trunk on the right. You can frame most any shot with most any tree in the same manner. As I said with the last shot I could have gotten more of the sunset, and less of the leaves, by moving down the hill a little bit, which would have opened up a clearer view and would have put the sun in that small open gap beneath the branch that currently covers it.
The boat obviously does not shine through the leaves so I moved down the hill a bit to place it in the middle of the gap between the branches. You can move the relative positions of objects in your shots by moving where you stand and getting higher or lower.
The same tree and its neighbor next door combine to form an arch that framed the shot with the ground at the bottom completing the full border wrapping around the lake, the sun, and the sailboats.
