Avenue of trees, Thrunton Wood

Almost exactly 2 years ago I went for a walk in the woods, at Thrunton Wood in Northumberland.

Having shared a single image from that short trip at the time, there are a few more that have slowly bubbled up in my Lightroom catalogue, that I've wanted to share at some point; not least this panoramic view of a cut through the woods that creates an avenue amongst the trees.

I had taken the original image at 23mm on my Fujifilm GFX 50S (~18.5mm full-frame equivalent) in the standard GFX 4:3 ratio—relatively ‘tall’, even in landscape orientation. Standing there at the time, the leading lines of the trees really pulled the eye into the depth of the ‘avenue’, though the photograph lost a chunk of that and it sat in Lightroom for quite a long time for me to occasionally puzzle over what I’d got wrong.

A common problem with very wide scenes that don’t actually have too much of interest through the full height, while having lots of depth, is that the sense of depth and scale can be totally lost at normal 4:3 or 3:2 ratios. Cropping down to a panoramic ratio cuts away the cruft and can pull the viewer back in again, which did the trick here once I finally remembered to try it.

The final image still isn’t fantastic: that foreground tree in silhouette is kind of interesting, but really just throws the composition off-balance and distracts from the eye being properly pulled into the image, but it’s closer to my memory of the scene and is a good reference for me to go back some time.

Having recently returned to what used to be my favourite local wood, at Simonside for the first time since a chunk of it was felled—and finding it ruined as an interesting, diverse woodland—Thrunton Wood is an area I need to get back to and spend some time exploring more.

Here’s a selection of images from that morning in April 2021: