Depressing Spruce Trees: Day Three

It was foggy and warm today, so I walked down into the forest off my road hoping for soft, flat light and properly eery forest shots. Started first on a pond because I wanted a dead-on, flat panorama of spruce trees:

10 exposures taken in portrait orientation and then stitched together in photoshop.

f/6.7
1/2 sec
ISO 80
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

I think many will find this static and boring, but I like it. It's a very obvious rule of thirds composition, with the snow and the sky matched fairly closely (I lightened the snow a bit to make the sky stand out more. The fog was not thick enough to show up in this photo, but it does give the sky it's soft, featureless look, which is what I wanted. This is truly a depressing spruce tree photo. Really, it's too dark, but if I lighten the snow, what little detail there is in the snow washes out.

On the way home I tried to take some trail photos. Didn't get anything I loved, but I wanted to include something showing the way through the forest, so I'm turning this one in as part of the final assignment:

This is another three-image HDR capture. It was nearly dark, so shutter speeds were 6, 10, and 20 seconds. ISO is 80 because I'm terrified of noise in these heavily processed images.

I'm not happy with the composition (especially the right foreground), but I do like the contrast between the white snow and grey sky, and I'm happy with the detail of the marks on the trail. A photo like this could work. This one isn't quite there.