However, the snow had other plans for me. Slippery when wet is one thing, but turning to concrete is another. It's been really warm for snow, and the fluffy white stuff wasn't so fluffy. More like peanut butter. Sticky, sloppy, heavy, meh. Very hard to ride in.
The first couple stops for pictures didn't turn out so well. Very frustrating trying to get a good self portrait when it takes about 3 minutes to do each try, not to mention setting things up. Let's just I was less than thrilled with the results.
But I wasn't going to give up, persevere and you will prevail. I found this weird will gully that looked promising for a picture. The snow was untrodden, and it had a neat little flow to it.
Find the right exposure for snow is really annoying. Snow is very white, but with detail, so somewhere around zone 8 maybe. I wanted a smaller depth of field, so I shot at f/3.5. To get the shutter speed, I couldn't really rely on the meter. Since everything is white, the meter was going to underexpose things by about 3 stops. It wants middle grey, snow is zone 8 and middle grey is zone 5, so three stops difference. So I shot at 1/800 to get close to the correct exposure, but still underexposed a little bit. This was to preserve lots of detail in the highlights, which is important for digital. You can always bump up things, but you can't recover blown out areas.
Now for the actual taking of the picture. I used the same method as I did for the last couple pics, intervelometer every second. Basically, I set up my camera to take a picture every second for 17 frames, with a 1 minute timer. This gave me time to scamper (slip and slide on a steep slope carrying a bike weighing about 40lbs with all the snow stuck to it) up to the top of the gully and ride down. I also set my phone with an alarm to go off after 1 minute, so I knew when the pictures were going to start.
I have to say, the gully was a ton of fun to ride. I didn't do any scouting or anything before I dropped in, and I couldn't see since it was covered with snow. It felt like it was just a big ol pile of baby heads (grape fruit sized rocks) that were coated with grease. It was a "hold on for dear life and bounce off the sides of the gully" sort of gig. Brakes were highly ineffective since there was so traction. I think the only thing that kept me up was the massive set of wheels under me. I had to ride it four times even though I got a good shot on the first try. Even took a little video! It's really not that extreme of a line, but a little sketchy in the wet snow!
To start off in editing, I fixed my contrast a bit. Upped everything, then compressed the highlights and shadows. This was the whites would be bright, and the blacks would be black, but the shadows and highlights would still have lots of detail in them.
In other words, I took the image which had contrast from zone 3 to 7, and pushed it to zone 1 and 9. Then I took zones 2,3, 7, and 8, and made them 3,4,6,7. There is still information in all the zones, just most of it is more readable now. The vast majority of information is in zones 6-8 though, since that's the snow. And there was a lot of snow. I also upped the exposure in the snow about half a stop to get it bright enough, so I suppose I could have shot at 1/640 and just do that adjustment in camera.
Finally, I added more contrast into the sky for more drama. Drama is good for skies, most of time. For this, definitely good.
See you tomorrow!
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