This is an image from my neighbourhood in New Brunswick. We just had a big ice storm which you can see in this image as "frosting" on the trees. The Acadian forest has a mix of conifer and deciduous trees and it's interesting to see how they cope with harsh conditions like this. The conifers are adapted to heavy snow loads and they do fine. They are dark coloured and the sun melts the ice anyway. The deciduous trees don't do well with branches breaking off and whole trees snapping.
I cropped, reduced the dynamic range of the image by painting a gentle black or white brush on an overlay layer filled with 50% grey, and sharpened. I also boosted the yellow and green channels a little.
Canon EOS 5D, 100mm f2.8 macro USM
capture date: Wednesday, 4 March, 2009 11:07 AM
exposure program: Aperture Priority
ISO speed: 200
shutter speed: 1/800
aperture: f8.0
exposure bias: +0.3
metering: Pattern
flash: OFF
Last edited by John Chardine; 03-04-2009 at 03:26 PM.
Reason: forgot the techs
I find these types of images very hard to compose and then translate to the viewer the feeling you had when you first envisioned it. The bright light reflecting off of the snow and the darker tress are hard to pull together. I think you are on the right track here. Just a boost in color, or some pop as it were, would give it strength and accurately portray what you had in mind.
As it is it lacks contrast . It has depth and perspective however.
1) S-curve to increase contrast in sky. On layer mask I painted black on the trees.
2) Shadow/Highlight Shadows at 66/25/30 to open up shadows and mid-tone contrast at 25% to boost snap in trees. On layer mask i painted black on the sky.
Hi John,
Not the most dynamic image.....but it is pretty effective. I like how Robert brought out the trees nicely but for my tastes....may go a hair less on the sky. I now find the fence at the base more noticable....so that should also be cropped/cloned out. did you crop the sky??? would be interesting to see more and compare.....but I do like the pano presentation. Nice capture of a difficult subject.
Thanks for all your help on this one and to Robert for the much improved repost. I guess I am still in the mode of trying to reproduce what I remember and therefore sometimes the image is flat. I mentioned this in the Macro forum but I've really had a lot of trouble trying to capture the ice storm "on film". Thankfully we don't get them very often and so I don't get much practice.
As well in this image I think I needed a stronger point of interest. I'll keep trying!
Recent ice storm
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