The Bleakness of October

Foggy October afternoon in the birch forest. Nearly all the trees have already shed their leaves. Winter is approaching.

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Location: Eggemoen, Norway [link]
Date: October 15th, 2007
Light Conditions: Fog
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Camera: Canon EOS 5D
Lens: Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM
Focal Length: 50 mm
Flash: --
Flash Mode: --

Shutter Speed: 1/13 sec
Aperture: 10.0
ISO: 100

Panorama: --
Tonemapping: --

Tripod: Manfrotto 055PROB
Tripod Head: Manfrotto 488RC2

Filters:
- B+W F-Pro Circular Polarizer 58mm

Comments
For me, October is one of the worst months of the year. However, this October has provided me with many photo opportunities. I am particulary found of this shot mainly due to the heavy fog and the mood it sets.

The dense fog helped me isolate this composition. I have been at this location earlier, but the shots from then are too cluttered. The mist really helped me.

Post-processing
Got a little help from the polarizer here. Brought out a little more yellow than usual.

Also, I shot this using AWB but that came out all wrong of course. So color temperature and tilt was adjusted.

A blue color-cast was edited out. The cast was especially prominent in the dense foggy parts of the image. This was done adding a grey photo filter adjustment layer then masking.

Sharpened for web using selective sharpening. This was done duplicating the original image and adding a layer mask to it. My standard web-sharpening was used across the image, then I masked out the leaves on the ground to reveal the unsharpened layer beneath.

Also, apologies for all the "tree-shots" lately. I just got tired of the same old stuff.

Hoping for some good feedback.

EDIT: I have a mirrored version of this shot which I think looks at least equally good. Will submit that version to scraps later today and perhaps do a switch.

EDIT2: Another version of this shot can be seen here.

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