Trees and grasses on the Chase

We were blessed with dry (albeith threatening looking) weather all morning, so I headed out for a stroll with the better half and chose Cannock Chase, at her suggestion. I decided to take the X10 out today, as didn't fancy carrying the weight of the D700 as I'm still not fully recovered.

Despite there being an occasional cutting wind, it was a very pleasant day for a stroll and I even spotted some blue sky (I'd started to forget what it looked like).

This scene particularly caught my eye as the three silver birch trees stood out nicely against the darker trees behind. I have slightly helped this in post-processing, by lightening the nearer trees using a curves layer and adding a slight gaussian blur to the more distant trees.

My initial intention was to convert the photo to an infra-red look, but I found that this Silver Efex preset (Yellow Plate 2) gave a far better result.