December Frost

This December mother nature offered up some wonderful landscape photo opportunities.
These were taken on a Saturday morning. The air was heavy with fog, frost was on everything and the ground had a new covering of snow from two days earlier. This white on white landscape was a challange to work.


These images tend to be more emotional, so, capturing that feeling is the challenge. A seasoned film photographer said to me once, “you should always under expose the image slightly so you don’t loose detail” and that’s still a good rule in this situation.

Exposure or white balance bracketing of your images in these conditions is the safest and easiest way. Then you can process HDR in CS2.

I like to capture the image in a some what old fashion way. With my D200, if I like the subject, I’ll spend a little time and experiment using sometimes 3 metering settings; 3D (with a “D” lens), group metering and spot. Then adjusting the F stop on each setting, by eye using the preview, I’ll try to capture what I’m visualizing in the image. I might blow it out intentionally just to give a it softer detail or step it back to give me more detail and deepen the contrast, or change the depth of field. Some of the essentials for a B&W composition which these conditions mostly dictate.

All this is done knowing that in the studio I already have an idea of the post processing needed to achieve the final result.