Last summer, thanks to COVID-19, instead of travelling out of the country for our vacation, we decided to rent a summer house for two months, far from our home city. It was different, much needed and very much appreciated. In the last few years, I felt the need to get closer to nature. Is it because I’m getting older? Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe. Whatever the reason, the summer of 2020 is full of fond memories. We will do the same this upcoming summer as we rented a summer house again but for six weeks only this time. Can’t wait.

Back to last summer. It was a very sunny summer, not too warm, not too rainy. I used to take a walk in the forest, each day, sometimes, more than once a day. Close to the summer house, along a small trail, there was this little cabin in the woods, standing there, alone, surrounded by big trees. I remember the smell, the sound of the wind hitting the forest. I took numerous pictures of this cabin. Inside, a bed, a table, a lamp, a singular smell of old wood, a cracking floor. It was a place to go alone, to think, to write, to just be. I didn’t spend the night there, even if I could, it felt a bit scary at night. See the following picture.

Behind the scene look

The header picture was in fact a series of seven images taken in bracketing mode where the exposure goes from -2 to +2 in 0.5 increments (or something like that, I don’t remember exactly the camera settings at the time). This series of images were then processed in Luminar’s HDR software to create a single image where the dark zones aren’t too dark and the highlights aren’t blown out. Then, I applied a few transformations to make the three organic structures stand out a bit more and add a dose of saturation. I brought the resulting image in Adobe Lightroom CC to make other adjustments on the luminosity, the perspective, and so on. Finally, I used a shortcut to resize the exported image to be 1500px wide to reduce its numeric weight before inserting it in this post.

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Previously published on HEY World but somehow didn’t import when I moved the Series here on Substack.