A circular polarizer would help deepen the blue of the sky, allowing you a longer exposure, brightening the trees without blowing the sky.
Based on the trunk darkness, you're shooting more towards the sun, than away from it. If you could get a bit more light on the trunk, it may help, though the trunk would also be brightened by suggestion #1.
Having the full tree in frame would be ideal too, or a single frame filling detail, such as a leaf. Right now it's a partial shot of a generic tree in bad lighting conditions.
On Flickr - Namethatnobodyelsetook on Flickr
R8 | R7 | 7DII | 10-18mm STM | 24-70mm f/4L | Sigma 35mm f/1.4 | 50mm f/1.8 | 85mm f/1.8 | 70-300mm f/4-5.6L | RF 100-500mm f/4-5-7.1L
Crop of the tree is pretty cool, i like the composition, yeah, i would use a polarizer as well to get some more light on the trunk.
Thank you both, for your comments, and ideas. I will look into find the best polarizer for my lens, although, i always thought these L lenses where supposed to avoid using these things! the photo is not cropped, i posted the actual shot, i wonder if it has been cropped automatically? here are more...
www.flickr.com/.../55208635@N07
A L-series lens speaks to it
Originally Posted by Ratbert
While it's true that they 'canna change the laws of physics', better optical elements mean better optical quality. For example, all L-series primes contain an aspherical lens element to reduce spherical aberration, and all L-series zooms contain a UD or fluorite element to reduce chromatic aberration. It's true that non-L lenses can have these elements (except for fluorite), but even then quality matters - for example, the aspherical elements in L-series lenses are ground and polished glass (highest optical quality), whereasin the non-L lenses with aspherical elements, those are molded glass, molded plastic, or a resin coating on a spherical glass element (in decreasing order of quality and cost).
You know overall these shots are very awesome in my humble opinion! i still cant believe i took these with the 5d and 35L!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/55208635@N07/
So are you saying my shots lack credentials? well you are right on that part, i have none! i still think that my shots are very nice considering my lack of what is considered magical skills to make picture. also i love my wife,my kids,my kitty, and my dogs!
I think the point above was that even an L-series lens is not going to magically give you polarizer effects when needed.