I’m going to start a new thing and call it Meandering Fieldnotes. I’m writing this on my phone as I sit under the tree. I think there might be more meaning and relevance to my writing if I share my experience while I am actually out there.
It’s 32°. I’m sitting under a gnarled old fir tree. Its shape declares its age more than its stunted height. Flurries of snow come and go on the whim of the wind. The stronger gusts create a gentle roar in the top of the tree I lean against. A few flakes filter through and clatter against my coat. Around me I hear a chorus of birdsong created by Robins, Dark-Eyed Juncos, a Northern Flicker and the ever present Magpie. Just now I heard a distant Sandhill Crane! I’ve spent the last 45 minutes meandering through a meadow of stones and snowflakes. My meandering, while truly random, was quite intentional. I was looking for early wildflowers. It looks like this will be a banner year for Yellow Bells, but they’re not yet blooming. I did find numerous Sagebrush Buttercups though. They’ve experienced a fairly hard freeze sometime in the last few days and now they’re getting snowed on! A little drama above me as a Magpie and a Squirrel have just had a bit of a dispute! Below me, on the valley floor, great bands of snow are sweeping across. They curve against the landscape looking just like an artist’s brush pushing hard against the canvas, leaving a heavy trail of paint behind. All things considered, it’s a lovely morning and I’m so grateful to be here.
Feedback Requests
Is the snowflake sufficiently in focus for this shot to work? The stacking process adds some contrast, so I reduced the contrast quite a bit on this one…does that work? For those willing, I’d love to hear a bit of critique on the story, less on the content and more on the length. I occasionally get responses that the story is too long and they didn’t read it, or I can tell by a comment that they didn’t read it. Try as I might, I struggle to make my photo stories any shorter than this one!
Pertinent Technical Details
When shooting this close to the subject, my 105 mm macro lens has a VERY shallow depth of field. I tend to shoot between 50 and 150 images depending on how close to the subject I am and how much of it I want in focus. I shot 100 for this one, but it was snowing hard enough that new flakes were interfering with the process. While looking through the images, I discovered this flake that appeared in one image and lasted for 16 images until another flake obliterated it! So, this is 16 images shot at ISO 200, f/6.3 and 1/20th of a second, which means the snowflake lasted all of a second or two! To showcase the snowflake, I cropped the image way in to probably 15% of the original but that lens is sharp enough that I dont think I’ve lost too much detail.
Wow! That capture is truly amazing! And fantastic that you spotted this in the stack and took advantage of it. The result is just fine by my standards, but my inner geek wonders about the result if you also did a full stack (or whatever amount of frames worked well) and then layered it with this partial stack and masked to reveal the amazing snowflake. But the falling snow probably made that unworkable.
I think you might consider a slightly tighter crop, just enough to remove the tangents on the left and top edges. Or a slightly looser crop.
The story just about fits my limited attention span, and is very nice. Sometimes I have trouble getting through a haiku. I would have a hard time writing good text in the field. The “moment” might be something to try to capture but I don’t think I could ever write something that didn’t profit from editing. More power to anyone who can!
I think this photo works so well because that perfect snowflake looks like a snow flower, and compliments the yellow buttercup below it. The image might be a little tight around the edges, but it’s no big deal because the center of attention is the flower and snowflake. I enjoyed your narrative as you expressed the feelings you had in the moment, and I could feel that too. Great job.
I love this image, the juxtaposition of the flake on the flower is great! There’s a lot of subject contrast in this image that works well - snow on a flower and the dominant warm tones of the flower but a chilly flake.
I think the snowflake works well and is sufficiently in focus. The contrast looks a little inconsistent to me, for example there’s the top left tip looks like it has more detail than the rest of the flake directly below it, but that could just be how it looked. (I didn’t think about this until after I read this was a stacked image and wondered if it could be an artifact of the stacking process. Also, I’m from the desert so my experience with snowflakes is limited!) Stacking images can be challenging and I think you’ve done a great job here in spite of the dynamic conditions.
I like your field notes. For me, photographs are only a part of the story and what you’ve written describes the other part. I like hearing and learning about the context of a photograph and sometimes write similar vignettes to go along with my photos. I think the length is fine. It has enough detail to give me a sense of the environment and conditions, and the details are interesting enough that I don’t mind reading a little more.
Wow! 10/10 for the image. 11/10 for the story telling.
Thbe image is amazing and the added story tells of the effort to capture it so perfectly. If I was to consider any suggestion it would be cropping tighter.
The story is a fine read and just the right length for me. I am a person of few words and would find writing the scene very difficult. That does not mean my thoughts are empty.
