Snow!

After the last couple day's of temperatures in the 40s and 50s, it's snowing in Boulder today! Actually pretty decent snow too, nice big fluffy flakes that stick and don't just melt immediately.

I wanted to do something with the falling snow, and I thought it might be cool to take some pictures of snow covered grass at a really wide open aperture. This might give some really cool snow bokeh effects with the shallow depth of field. I played around with it a bit, but didn't come up with anything I really liked.

They aren't bad really, but I wanted to do something a little more abstract and less photographic. But what?

Shallow depth of field is one way to separate the background from the subject, but how else could I do it....what about using motion blur? With bikes and sports it's a pretty commonly used technique to create a sense of motion or speed. I thought it might work with snow too.

I slowed the shutter down to 1/13 and raised the aperture to f/11. This isn't even fast enough to shoot handheld with a 50mm, and so purposely moving the camera really made some soft photos. Which I loved.

My technique was to start up high, and follow the snow as it fell. When the framing I wanted was about to come together, I hit the shutter. The results were awesome. The snow was actually very in focus, but had some really cool blur to some parts too. The background was almost unintelligible, but still enough to make out the general gist of it. It really made the photo about the atmosphere of the time, not the content. Right along the lines of the Pictorialism, which I really enjoy. Sometimes the sharpness of photography gets in the way of what you want to capture.

Editing, I set my black and whites points first, then adjusted the clarity slider until I got the levels I wanted. Too much clarity and the photo becomes too sharp, but too little and the snow falling is lost. Then I adjusted my highlights and shadows; I made the snow very white, and brought a lot of detail back into the blurred shadows. I guess detail isn't the right word, but I brightened them up a bit.

Finally, I adjusted my tone curve ever so slightly to brighten the whites a hair. I wanted more control of what specific area of the curve I wanted to adjust, and the whites slider doesn't give that control.

After I exported, I looked at the different calibration presets there were, and I actually ended up changing the photo from standard to landscape. It further brightened the whites a bit. Exported again and then I was done. It's not uncommon for me to do this four or five times with photos, there's always little changes to be made.

See you tomorrow!