Sun star ornament

It is more a draft then finished image yet, and I am planning on exploring the concept more.
The evergreen grows across the street from my house. I was walking past it, looking for an interesting subject to photograph, when I saw the sun peeking through the leaves. I remembered to close down the aperture to get the star sun burst, and shoot away. But on image created this way, the branches of the tree where completely dark, taking away from the image. The solution? I did two things, one “in camera”, one in post-processing, to achieve the effect I wanted. First, I popped up the build-in flash. It was itself turned out to not be enough of light to get all the detail in the tree. I used the Lightroom preset “DH is my hero” from Sean McGrath collection, to achieve some of HDR toning without using an outside-Lightroom software.

Side note – you can find some more free preset links in this post.