Bonzai In The Snow

[Gordon Craig]

While walking through the woods in about a foot of snow I saw what I believe are dead flowers poking out the top. As I focused in on them I was reminded of a Bonzai plant. I don't know what type of flower or plant this is. It was shot with a Canon 5D camera using a Canon 180MM lens. The aperture was f/32, exposure was 1/8, and the ISO was 200. I was not using a filter on my lens. I am thinking that I should have. I am also interested in any photoshop enhancement suggestions.

[Dave Mills]

Hi
Hope you don't mind but I was playing with the image a bit and tried to bring more light and detail in the plant. Your exposure seemed to be off since a vast majority of the image is snow you should compensate your exposure on the plus side to bring out the whiteness. I selected just the bush...used S/H and sharpened. I also cropped it a bit. The next step would be to lighten the snow somewhat...

[Aristotle Georgiou]

Hi Gordon

Great looking plant with superb colours to go with it.

I agree the shot is underexposed and the composition isn't quite working for my taste. With the composition I would take it as a vertical showing a wide top side view of the plant and placing it towards the bottom left hand corner. This will show off the contrast between this wonderful plant against white snow.

Does that make any sense? I hope it does.

[Mike Moats]

Hey Gordon, how you doing, agree with Dave lightening of the plant and as he points out the snow needs to be a brighter white. I also agree with Ari that this could also work well in a vertical comp.

[Julie Kenward]

Okay, Gordon, if you put this into Photoshop and open a levels adjustment you'll see that the right side of the histogram is almost a flat line. Take the slider farthest on the right (the one for highlights) and move it from 255 down to the middle to about 200. That brings the snow up to a closer true value of white.

It also, surprisingly, left it with a little bit of pink tint because of the plant...so I then opened up the color balance layer, clicked on "highlights" and scooted the top slider away from red and over to cyan just a little bit and then did the same thing for the slider below it - moving it away from red and over to green (again, just a little bit.)

I think a vertical crop would work here but think you were on the right track with a horizontal one - you just centered the plant a bit too much. I chopped off part on the right and put the majority of the plant on that side of the frame. See what you think: