Billowing Birch

What a wild and windy day we have had today. According to the weather people, the wind has been blowing in gusts of between 80 and 140kph and there has been no let up for the past 20 hours or so. Unfortunately a 45 year old woman was killed last night when she was hit by a falling tree near the centre of Dublin City. She was just walking along, minding her own business. A sorry reminder that we truly never know the day nor the hour.

I spent a good while down by the sea shooting the movement of the waves and doing my best to stop the tripod being blown away with the camera still attached. Twice, I had to reach out to grab hold of it in the middle of a long exposure. The results were reasonably good but in the end I have decided to post this photo, the first one of the day, which I shot in my own back garden. We have 3 or 4 Birch trees out there, which Mrs. Joesblips planted a long time ago, to remind her of her native Finland. They have been waving all over the place all day long in the wind, with bits of smaller twigs and branches being blown off them at regular intervals and I was impressed with just how much punishment they were putting up with.
Here, using ND filters, to enable a longish exposure time, I have tried to show some of the wild movement. Originally I sepia toned the shot but to warm it up a bit I placed a new fill layer of solid pink on top and used the attached layer mask to cut back through the pink a little.