Lichen in Winter

Subdued light (still snowing) made it possible to capture all the detail of the lichen and all the detailed structure of the snow in this macro shot. The line where they meet and overlap is what the image is about.

Sony DSC H50 at 31mm equivalent and macro. F4.0 @ 1/60th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Blackpoint right in Lightroom. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennbunk ME.

And here is a similar (at least in concept) shot from the same day.

Winter Birch along the Mousam

Happy Sunday!

Snow on White Birch, the dark water in the background, subdued light (still snowing), and careful framing for composition. And there you have it.

Sony DSC H50 at about 180mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

A touch of Recovery in Lightroom. Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME. 

Train to Winter Never Comes

At least it hasn’t been down this track lately. We live beside a track that has maybe 5 trains a day during  the summer…apparently less in winter. It is still snowing in this shot, and you can see the snow closing in like fog as the distance increases. I jockeyed back and forth across the tracks to find the right angle, where the tracks did useful eye-work in the frame, and zoomed in slightly to get the framing I needed.

Sony DSC H50 at 38mm equivalent. F5.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Slight Recovery in Lightroom. Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME.

Icicles!

We got a little sun yesterday, rare in this new year so far, though I am sure there is plenty coming. There are big icicles everywhere. These hang off the eves over our back deck. This is a macro taken from about 1/4 inch. I actually bumped the ice. I was trying to capture what was happening to the light inside the ice.

Sony DSC H50 at 32mm equivalent and macro. F5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Blackpoint to the right in Lightroom. A bit of Fill Light. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME.

Winter Quarry Edge 3

One more from the same spot as the past two. I again used the zoom to frame just a small section of the view…to catch these freighted Phragmites reeds against the snow. It has a Japanese feel to me.

Sony DSC H50 at 465mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/320th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Blackpoint to the right in Lightroom. A bit of Fill Light for the color, plus added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME.

Winter Quarry Edge 2

Taken from exactly the same spot as yesterday’s Pic of the Day. I simply zoomed in to frame just a section of these brightish reddish plants against the snow. Snow clinging to the vegetation, the lacy structure of the leaves…there is are a lot of textures here to catch the eye.

Sony DSC H50 at about 250mm equivalent. F5.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Blackpoint to the right in Lightroom, with added Clarity and more than usual Vibrance (for the color). Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME.

Winter Quarry Edge

This is a very bleak view in the summer as this is a working quarry, but with a covering of snow, and the deep parts of the hole flooded due to unusually high water levels this month, it is actually an attractive view. Of course it is the color of the barberry and phragmities against the snow storm that attracts the eye, while the quarry in the background gives it scale. The falling snow gives the tree-line in the background a unusual softness.

Sony DSC H50 at 31mm equivalent. F5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Very slight recovery in Lightroom for highlights. Blackpoint well to the right. Added Clarity and more than usual Vibrance (for the little color). Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME.

Ice Edge Lace

A shot from the deep freeze of last week, taken along the Little River at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. The Little here is a mix of salt and fresh, depending on the tide. Tides have been running abnormally high with lunar effects and storms combined this past month so when the cold snap came the ice that formed from a thin layer of fresh water floating on top of the salt was unique. The result was all kinds of interesting patterns…like this one, caught against the flowing water which had dropped a few inches already on the changing tide.

Sony DSC H50 at about 180mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/600th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Blackpoint to the right in Lightroom. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Rachel Carson NWR Seasons.

New Year Route 1 Blizzard

Happy Sunday!

They have already named this storm, a classic Nor’easter: the result of two storms, one from the west and one from the south, meeting along the mid-atlantic coast and tracking north into the Gulf of Maine, swinging out to sea, picking up moisture, and then swinging back toward land to dump snow deep on northern New England. I live well within the track of this one, almost exactly half way between US Rt 1 and the ocean, two miles inland. Snow has been falling off and on for two days. Today the heaviest fall is expected. With wind.

This shot is Parson’s Beach yesterday morning, while the storm was still off-shore and headed out to sea. About 3 inches had fallen and, as you see, we were still deep in the storm. By yesterday afternoon when I was out again  maybe two more had accumulated. The snow was just kind of crystallizing out of the air and drifting down. I wrote a haiku about it.

Not flakes, lazy, drift
snow crystallizes in still air…
settles, disappears

Towards the end of my walk it really began to snow. This morning there is between 8 inches and a foot on my deck, but it is blowing. I hope to get out for a few more shots during the day, if the roads are passable.

And this is, of course, nothing. In a serious Nor’easter, we can get 24 inches in 24 hours…sometimes more. But they named the storm anyway. The combination of the date, New Year’s Day, and the track, right up US Route 1, was, I guess, just to attractive to ignore. The weather service says a little pocket just north of us , around Bath Maine, will get that kind of snow from this storm.

Snow photography is always a challenge. You may see a P&S Landscape post on this subject in the near future. These shots were taken in dull light, as snow was still falling from a very low sky. I used Programmed auto, without adjustments, since, in my experience, it comes as close to a balanced exposure in this kind of light as I am likely to get. Then, back in Lightroom, I apply a bit of Recovery to bring out the texture of the snow (by toning down the highlighs), a touch of Fill Light for the underexposed dark areas of the scene (which includes most of the colors), and then I move the Blackpoint to the right to restore contrast and vividness. It is generally necessary by then to adjust either Exposure or Brightness to bring the whites up to a realistic level. Sounds like a lot of work, but in Lightroom it takes only seconds.

The alternative is to use exposure compensation in the camera, and, again, with my camera, I find that it produces images in which either 1)  the darks and colors are way more difficult to reclaim, or 2) the snow is totally blown out and has no texture at all. Programmed auto strikes a balance where I can almost always reclaim both extremes.

Additional processing: Added Clarity and Vibrance (needed to really bring out the snow texture and to give any color in the scene a fighting chance) and Sharpen Landscape preset.

From Winter Weather Kennebunk ME.

Cactus Wren

From the Desert Botanical Garden visit just before Christmas. This guy put on quite a show for me, practically at my feet, before perching up here and posing for his portrait.

The strong backlight/side-light, while it provides drama and some really nice effects in the seed head, made it necessary to use a combination of Fill Light in Lightroom, and Blackpoint to the right to bring out the detail in the shadowed body of the bird. It works. The nice graduated blue in the sky behind the bird was just there…could not have planned it or made it happen. Sometimes it just all comes together.

Sony DSC H50 at at full 465mm equivalent and macro. F5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.

Besides the Fill Light and Blackpoint adjustments already mentioned, added Clarity and Vibrance and the Sharpen Landscapes preset in Lightroom.

From Desert Botanical Gardens 09.

Here is a quick grab shot of the bird at my feet doing some strange feather ruffling thing.