Spring Ice Heave

[Steve Maxson]

I took this photo a week ago on a nearby lake. I liked the tunnel created by the pressure of the expanding ice. For scale, the tilted sheets of ice are about one foot thick and we are looking about 20 feet into the tunnel. The foreground elements are shards of decaying ice. 40D, EF-S10-22 (at 10mm), 1/60, f/22, ISO 100. Comments are welcome.

[Travis Novitsky]

Hi Steve,

I love this image! I really like your choice of composition with the low perspective. Ice is one of my favorite things to photograph and I wish I had been there to shoot my own images of this ice heave :-) The only thing I might suggest is to give this a bit of a clockwise rotation, as it feels like it is leaning to the left.....its probably just because of the dominant ice on the right, but I think a little rotation would help to take away that feeling of leaning. Nice work!

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Steve,
Besides the CW rotation (which i didn't do)..........I loved the overall look of this image. Looked a little bright on my monitor........adjusted midtone levels slightly........a little blue on the color balance......and finally my "new favorite"...Robert's USM trick for local contrast adjustment. I feel it brought out more detail in the BG blue's but............let me know what you think. You have all the details and comp there........just work them up a bit,
Roman

[Steve Maxson]

Thanks for the comments Travis and Roman. Travis, I went back and measured the original and it does need about 1.2 degrees of CW rotation - good catch. I should have noticed that myself. Roman, I like your repost as it is a more dramatic image. I also still like the original. I think it is a matter of what kind of look you are going for and both would work for me. :) I wouldn't mind hearing what some other folks think about this.

[Robert Amoruso]

I am kind of partial to the USM trip for upping local contrast but can go either way with this image.

BTW, David Kennedy first mentioned it in the Pano forum. Even though I use it a lot, he mentioned it first. Neither of us own it though - been around awhile. I have been meaning to put a tutorial together for it and started one a week ago. Still messing with it but it will get up.

[Grady Weed]

A very interesting image. Ice can be very beautiful. I like your original image. I do not know how to improve it so I wont offer any suggestions. But I sure do like it. Shapes, varied blues and whites. Nice.

[Stephen Stephen]

Steve I really like this image in particular the perspective and the various textures. Well done.

[Bob Ettinger]

Nice lines leading into the image. Interesting composition. Well done