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Hello fellow #Hive photography lovers!... Today I bring to share with you my particular vision on one of our mountain forests. These photos try to expose the forest and its surroundings in a less formal way, leaving aside the framing in precise areas and trying to extract the abstraction inherent in this kind of environment...

These forests are no longer as large as they were half a century ago and have also lost much of the moisture generated by some of the streams that once flowed through them. This depletion of our forests is due in equal parts to climate change and deforestation to make way for livestock and crops. This is something that obviously affects me emotionally, as I knew these forests when they were true natural paradises. So I am taking these photos to visit these places while they are still here, because I estimate that in a quarter of a century we will no longer have these forests in our mountains... And maybe I won't be here either, so many things will have changed by then...

The mist typical of late mornings makes these forests even more enchanting to photograph in. The mist serves as a catalyst to bring out the shapes, textures and patterns of the forest. To take these photos I woke up at 05:30 am. and half an hour later I was already in the middle of the climb up the mountain road to the west of my village. I started taking photos at about 6:45 am and was there for a couple of hours until the fog began to clear and the sunlight began to penetrate the forest canopy and its inner trails. Here we are feeling very seriously the effects of the weather phenomenon called "El Niño" and the heat and solar radiation already at 10 am. is hard to bear. In addition, the dry season has already started and we have to avoid too much exposure to the harsh weather and dehydration. So I started to descend quickly back to the village. But I already had a lot of lovely pictures in my camera...

I was about to take my fixed 50mm lens with me on this photo walk. But before I left the house I thought I would want to take pictures of distant areas of the forest without having to go too far into it and thus take advantage of the ability of zoom lenses to concentrate many elements on the same plane thanks to the perspective effect generated by the longer focal lengths. So finally I put my old 55-300 mm zoom lens on my camera and it was with this lens that I did all this work of recording abstraction in the forests of our mountains. The first half hour of work was arduous, as the light was still low, but then everything improved and I started to get pictures that I loved just looking at them raw on on my camera's display.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL INFO: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.

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Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!

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Montalbán, Carabobo, Venezuela.