Monday, December 12, 2005

Halifax after our first snow

This is very likely my last post before I head out to Sable Island on Tuesday, although the weather is not looking great. When I return (27 Jan) I hope to have several diary entries with photos of my stay out there.

Northwest Arm, Halifax

On Friday night (Dec 9) we had our first snow storm which, for a Brit, was quite exciting. So I went out on the Saturday and took a few pics. Nothing really special here but some nice snowy pics. To balance the colours, I used Hue/Saturation with -2 for Hue to bring more warmth into the picture to balance out the cold look of the snow and blue sky.














This picture is a close up using the same Hue/Saturation. The colour of the wood beneath/next to the sheds comes out really nice with the Hue set to -2.









I was really playing here, but liked this image because of the contrast between the snow and the leaves. It signifies the changing of the seasons from Autumn to Winter. I also liked the cracks in the snow. Again the -2 Hue brought out the bronze colour in the leaves which adds a nice contrast to the snow.














And this is the front of my house. The Hue brings out the colour in the woodwork around the windows. The Shadows/Highlights function was used to darken the sky a little and createa better tonal balance overall.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow - nice shots! The snow has come out nice and bright, which is a good sign. Sometimes, as the snow is seen as very bright (>18% gray) by the camera's internal meter, it compensates by underexposing, trying to force the mid-gray tones to be this 18% gray. Thus, the rule for bright scenes is to (counter-intuitively) increase the exposure by about 1 stop to compensate for the camera error. The reverse is true of dark scenes - decrease the exposure by about 1 stop on average. Yours have come out well - did you do this deliberate compensation while taking the shot, or did you do it in PS later (both valid, but good to get it as close to right in-camera first).
Ivan

Critical Light said...

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for the comments. I compensated the exposure when shooting the picture. This is one of the reasons why I did a shoot; to play around with shooting snow. Now, I wish I had done some auto-bracketing to see the difference it makes.

Damian