Northern Wisconsin stays in the grip of winter pretty long, but it’s starting to weaken. That’s why when we got some snow and cold temps for couple of nights I headed over to my surrogate backyard - Ripley creek. I shoot there a lot because it’s gorgeous, has lovely trails and is 8 minutes from my house.
I knew there’s be good ice so that’s what I went in search of. This is gone by now (shot it Wednesday), but it’s too fun to let it go by, especially that we’re entering the part of early spring where everything is still dormant and nothing has sprouted yet. The formation is about 3 feet long and is in a shady spot just before a hairpin bend in the brook.
Specific Feedback Requested
I cooled down the wb because Ripley creek is pretty tannic and I wanted to bring up the blues in the ice. Is it too much? Would a more ‘natural’ presentation work better?
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Lumix G9
LUMIX G VARIO 35-100mm F2.8 @ 56.0 mm (112mm equiv.)
f/11 | 4s | ISO 400
Tripod in water on an ice shelf
Lr processed for wb adjustment, some cropping off the top & general control of white and black points, local adj brush to dodge & burn in the water to emphasize the patterns there. Also in the icicles themselves to improve tonalities and clarity. Ps for some smart sharpen and TK6 mask to manage the highlights better. Cropped to remove some log at the top that wasn’t doing much.
You can’t beat having a go to spot only eight minutes from the house, Kristen. It sure does help when you become familiar with an area and you can head there when the weather conditions look promising. This is a beautiful slice of winter with the icicles hanging over the flowing creek. Maybe it is just me, but I am noticing a little cyan tint more so than blue. I could see that reduced just a little, but that is subjective and just my personal preference.
When opening the large version the details in the ice and snow are amazing and jump out at the viewer. Beautiful scene for sure.
The idea with the icy log hanging over the creek is very appealing. Aside from the comment about color I think the dynamic range is beyond the sensors capacity and the whites are blown out. Which makes the snow look textureless in many places. I, personally, would use a faster speed for the water. I suspect that this is technically a difficult image to pull off requiring some experimentation and perhaps exposure bracketing.
I didn’t see any clipping in the histogram, but I can doublecheck. SS is variable, too. I didn’t want it to be too long so upped the ISO a tad, but maybe slowing would underexposed it slightly and saved the snow somewhat.
Hey @Kris_Smith there is a point in the histogram where things aren’t technically clipped but as they push closer and closer to pure white, detail starts to disappear. That may be what happened here. Essentially there is no ability for contrast so everything just turns white in about the last 10% of the right (and left) side of the histogram. The other thing I would consider would be to maybe try to cool the white parts of the water. It feels a bit muddy and conflicts with the cool nature of the snow which may have been a style choice but for me I think the harmony between the water and snow may look nice. I do love the ice and crisscross of the trees though!
I’ve seen similar ice formations on logs like this in a number of places, and they can be pretty interesting to work with. I think of them being like natures chandeliers. I like the composition, having the log at an angle like that creates a more dynamic look. And having the second log at the top is effective as a framing element. I agree with @Igor_Doncov about wanting a faster shutter speed for more texture in the water. This is a case where you could bracket shutter speeds for different looks in the water, and then blend it into a bracket properly exposed for the log/ice.
[quote=“Kris_Smith, post:1, topic:20748”] I cooled down the wb because Ripley creek is pretty tannic and I wanted to bring up the blues in the ice. Is it too much? Would a more ‘natural’ presentation work better?
Color is subjective, but since you asked, here is my opinion. I agree with @Ed_Lowe about there being a cyan tint, and it feels slightly “off”. I also think the cooler looking whites makes the hanging icicles blend into the dark background a bit. I did a rework where I used TK Neutralize Color Cast 1 to get purer whites, and I think this helps emphasize the shapes of the icicles. I also used a TK Lights 2 mask to burn the highlights along the top edge, to draw more attention to the center. You could go a bit cooler than my rework, but that’s subjective. I think the pure whites emphasize the icicles better.
Thanks everyone - @David_Wallace was right about the clipping - bah. Brought those down though so hopefully better.
Did a big change to the color cast and think it’s more natural without being too yellow/tannic.
@Ed_McGuirk - with regard to bracketing & blending. I’ve done a bit of that, but never with a subject with so much change in a big area. If you know of a good tutorial explaining a method of dealing with this, that would be helpful. So far all my HDR merges have been in Lightroom and it’s good as far as it goes, but I imagine Photoshop does a better job. Thanks in advance.
I’m not talking about exposure blending for dynamic range (ie HDR Merge in LR). What I refer to is taking one base exposure bracket that gets the land well exposed with no clipping at either end (a good starting point for basic processing). It doesn’t matter what the water flow looks like in this base exposure. I then take other brackets by changing the shutter speed to get different looks in the water flow. You can also keep overall exposure the same in these brackets by varying ISO. This then gives you brackets that create different looks and textures in the water. You then use Photoshop layer masks to manually blend the water from one of your brackets into the base exposure. you blend by painting manually on the mask (it’s easier than it sounds). In the case of this image people asked for water with a faster shutter speed to create more definition and texture in the water. If you did that in one exposure, it would mess up the exposure in the rest of the image. What I would have done here is take one exposure as you did (because the ice, log, etc, are properly exposed). Then take another with a faster shutter speed, where the water looks “better”. Bringh these two images into PS, and manually mask in the water from the faster shutter speed into the base image. You can manually paint without halos if you are careful.
I gave up on Lightroom Merge to HDR for several reasons. One primary reason was that when you have moving water, LR HDR sees this as “ghosting”, and can do some funky things to moving water, that usually don’t look so good. You have little to no control over how moving water looks when using HD software to blend exposures. So I blend them manually instead, getting a good base exposure for the land, and one or more exposures that get the water better. Then manually blend in PS.
I took a crack at the water in the foreground with two adjustments. The first was a “Highlights/Shadows” Image Adjustment in PS. It has to be done to a pixel layer so I have never really done it before, but I recently saw it looking back at a few Sean Bagshaw videos. It takes some tweaking to get it right, if you are interested I can give you what settings I used. I brushed this into the foreground water so it didn’t effect the whole image. Essentially what it does is try to add some structure back into the white area at the bottom. Then I used the same mask to desaturate that area a bit to try to tame some of the colors in there without messing up the nice bits at the top.
Thanks David. This looks pretty good. It’s nice of you to take the time. I’ll have to check out the SB videos at some point. The internet being what it is for me (no cable in the ground, cellular hotspot only with 100gb cap for two people), intense video watching is a no-go.
Oh yeah, thats an issue for sure! This was part of one of his paid courses, you download the content. Might be something beneficial for you as you could pay the fee for the videos maybe while connected elsewhere and then you don’t have to worry about streaming.
One of my local libraries is open and I go there for intense downloading and so that’s something I will do if needs must. Sometimes if one or both of us are gone for a while during a month we have lots of leftover bandwidth and I can get things done then. I love living in the sticks, but this is a downside. Not only am I rural, but I’m in a fly-over state and no one cares about connectivity here.
I hear ya! I worked at a school 30 minutes outside of Columbus OH and people had to pay the cell companies for connection because there were no other service providers…crazy!
