Image was made yesterday morning at Lake Galena in Peace Valley Park (Bucks County, PA) in the minutes before sunrise. The lake obviously was frozen.
Used my Canon 50D; 24-70 2.8L w/ a 3-stop graduated neutral density filter; all tripod mounted.
When I got home and looked at the images on the big screen, I felt they were cold, desolate, lonely and boring. I wanted cold, desolate, lonely and less boring. So I went to work. I started with cropping out some of the excess ice in the foreground in order to provide a better balance. Then I ran the image through Nik Dfine to remove any noise that may have presented itself. Moving on to Viveza 2.0, I opened up the blacks in the trees on the left and right and reduced brightness while adding saturation to the ice and sky accentuating the blues and reds. I also reduced structure a bit in order to start smoothing the ice blemishes. After contenting myself that I did what I wanted to do in Viveza, I moved on to Color Efex Pro. I said that I had used a 3-stop GND while shooting but felt it could use a bit more so I used the Graduated ND filter in Nik and finished it off by softening and smoothing the image using a filter designed, I think, for portraits called Glamour Glow. Finally I used Sharpener Pro to reduce the structure and focus a bit more in order to reduce the impact of the ice blemishes even more – much like a portrait photographer would do to remove skin blemishes.
“Fire and Ice” is the result… cold, desolate, lonely.
I really love the colors in this, Ed. Fire and ice is a very good title! Nice blacks help balance out the cold steeliness and really ground the image - without those trees you'd really have trouble focusing your eyes and holding a spot but they really work to ground the image.
Perfect title! I love the soft, but detailed branches in the trees framing the shot and the colors are striking. I was trying to decide whether a crop off the bottom would be better, as there is a large expanse of water (albeit frozen!) but your strip of dark blue is the same size as your sky, so it perhaps gives some balance to the image.
Ed, I like the concept here of fire and ice. I think you ended up with an image that does look cold, desolate and lonely. I like the effect the Glamour glow had on the image. The reflected colors from the sky on the ice are lovely.
Fire and Ice
