Welcome! Here are the results from the “Photographing the Winter Landscape” workshop that was held on Saturday, January 25, 2020. So nice to meet all of you! Email me the images you liked at jrodewald@naturessakephoto.com and I will include them up here, too. Include caption text in the email, too, if your want. I will put your name on your images.
Its always nice to see everyone’s work, lets make a great gallery collection together!
“Before” image of an American beech leaf against snow. Taken with my Samsung S9 cell phone in pro photo mode so that it could record RAW image data.
Same image, but I opened it in Lightroom and Photoshop to remove the distracting dirt and leaf fragments. Contrast, detail and curve adjustments. I then adjusted the luminosity of different color spectra to highlight the yellow wavelength and darken the oranges.
Again, same image but this time I tweaked it using Snapseed on the cell phone. Removed the debris using the healing brush. Then tweaked contrast, detail and the exposure curve. A good example of what you can do with one image, you can really get different effects.
An oak leaf sealed against ice. Again, taken with my cell phone camera for demonstration. I cleaned up the debris around the leaf and did my adjustments in Lightroom and Photoshop. These adjustments just bring out the image I see in my head, not adding things that were not really there.
Same image just processed in black and white and then adjusted the color spectra to highlight and darken different background colors that make up the black and white image. Again, two very different images but you can see the flexibilit of digital media at this point. One key tip with these leaf shots: hold the camera sensor parallel to the thing you are photographing. In close up shots if you do not do that you will notice one part will be blurry while the other parts are not. By holding it parallel to your subject the whole thing is in sharp focus.
And you questioned my sanity in getting this photograph! Rightfully so, it did seem foolish especially since you didn’t know I had high waterproof boots on. (Muck Boot brand thermally rated down to -25 F). Anyway, after the effort I’m not sure I like the shot afterall. My favorite piece of it is the reflections in the water showing tree detail. After staring at it for a little while last night I realized maybe the issue was color — there isn’t much to work with. The rocks are interesting but that is textural, not color. So I decided to flip it to black and white and see how that worked.
This is the second of the two big waterfalls along “Northwest Bay Brook”. I just love this spot, its different every time I come out. I actually featured it in my 2020 calendar this year. The log is a new addition, it must have fallen this Fall. No pun intended. Well, maybe. Anyway, proceed with caution at this spot. Ice, obviously. In the warmer months its very slick and there is poison ivy along the right side and there are timber rattle snakes basking on the rock. We had neither in the Winter, a definite plus for Winter photography.
A blurry cell phone image, but I really like this scene. If I was more confident with the ice thickness I would walk out there to get it all centered. See how the sky is so bright and distracting? That would be tough to avoid in this scene. Cloud interest would be a big help, but we had none of that on Saturday.
Here is the black and white version. What I did here was created an identical image and processed it for the rock detail. I then processed the image for everything else not rock. I then blended the two, essentially painting in the rock detail into the other image. I like this one better, a more balanced exposure and not so brown. Brown, although I love the color, is muddy when it comes to art.
Budding Winter photographer in action! Way to get in at it all and take the shot!
A demo shot of the fern at our last stop. I flipped it to black and white as well because I didn’t care for the original version. I have a lot of complaints about it but it does demonstrate that sometimes the better subject are right at your feet. So often we try to take in the whole scene when the more interesting scene is much smaller. Eliminate all the distractions you can with photography and your image will get stronger. A telephone pole, an annoying branch, a piece of litter. The less distractions the stronger the image.