Old Guardian

Old Guardian, originally uploaded by Thomas Gehrke.

This tree was growing right in the middle of the path and for some reason it really stood out to me.

So this is actually a composite of two shots taken at different exposures. It's not a HDR image, but I did use a slightly underexposed shot to pull a little detail back into some overblown areas.

The DoF blur is actually real for once (I didn't add it in Photoshop). Otherwise, there were some channel and curve adjustments made as I converted the original color image to black and white.