I’ve been trying to get the hang of my new Canon 70-200 f/2.8L, so I brought that along. The lake was completely frozen over, with people ice skating at the far end. We took a walk through the woods, and on our way back stopped on the snow covered beach. Here there were 3 lifeguard towers with signs on them indicating that there were no lifeguards and swim at your own risk. I tried to get some shots of the three towers in a line, but just couldn’t capture anything that seemed interesting. Then, I came along the sign that said “Unguarded Waterfront” with a lifeguard tower, frozen lake, and snow-covered beach behind it. It just seemed somewhat ironic and amusing to me.

I was shooting aperture priority mode (Av) at f/3.2 because I wanted the sign in clear focus with the background blurry, but still slightly identifiable. As it turns out, I am kicking myself for not trying something with a smaller aperture, as the sign on the lifeguard tower is completely indecipherable. If I went back, I’d probably choose f/8 so that the background was a little more identifiable. Because I was shooting a primarily snow-covered scene, I dialed in a slight bit of exposure compensation (EV) – +1/3 stop. Camera meters take what they see and assume that the entire scene would average out to be 18% neutral gray. This is normally a decent assumption and is one of the many reasons why 18% gray cards are used frequently by photographers. Snow isn’t even close to 18% gray – it’s like…2% gray, especially in sunlight. If I were to shoot with no exposure compensation, I’d end up with an underexposed scene because the camera would try to make the snow into gray. I usually have to play with the exposure compensation value a bit to get it right, but as a rule of thumb, when taking pictures of bright snow, bump the EV up a bit, and if taking a picture of your black cat, lower it a bit.

When I downloaded the images last night, I was drawn to this photo. I like the humor of it and I like the way it is framed. What I don’t like, as I mentioned above, is that I chose too shallow a depth of field, so you don’t really know what’s behind the sign. If I had picked something more like f/8 or so, I think the humor would have shined through better.

Here you see the original image, straight out of the camera and imported into Adobe Lightroom. It’s pretty boring. Almost no color, with little texture in the snow, and no contrast in the wood grain. So, I went to work on it. In Lightroom, I adjusted the white balance to 7100K by using the white balance eyedropper tool and selecting the white of the sign. I usually shoot in Auto White Balance mode when I’m shooting in RAW simply because I can easily adjust it later. With JPG, you don’t have as much latitude there. I bumped up the exposure by +1/4 stop and increased the clarity and contrast some. I also set the tone curve to “Strong contrast”. I knew I would be bringing this into Photoshop and sharpening it there, so I lowered the sharpening in Lightroom to 0.

Then, I exported it to Photoshop CS4. There, I applied a very strong unsharp mask to the Lightness channel in LAB Mode. This pulled a lot of texture out of the wood without creating halos and odd colors. I also applied a technique used in a few of my other images (as in the one shown here) where I duplicated the background layer, desaturated it, and set the blend mode to Overlay with about a 60% opacity. This has the effect of really kicking up the contrast and making a dull image pop a lot more. The reason for the desaturation is otherwise, you end up altering the colors of the image as well. I also did a slight crop of the image, removing the fence visible in the bottom of the frame, and did some slight adjustment with a levels layer – moving the middle slider to the left to increase contrast. Finally, I added a saturation layer and lowered the saturation of the image by about -50. This had the effect of making it almost black and white, but not quite. Then, I saved it, and exported it to Flickr from Lightroom with medium sharpening.

That was a lot of editing for a mediocre photo, but I’m fairly happy with the way it came out. I’m always trying to stretch myself creatively and in this case I think I had a partial success in doing something slightly out of my normal comfort zone of landscapes.

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

I set up with my Canon Rebel XTi, Sigma 10-20, a 2 stop hard edge graduated neutral density (GND) filter, my tripod, and my homemade remote shutter trigger and went to town. Every time I go out and shoot a sunset, I am reminded that I really wish I had a 3 stop GND filter, but I am able to make due with the 2 stop one plus a little bit of post processing. I wanted a long exposure, so I also added a polarizer into the mix which functioned as a neutral density filter since there was little polarized light shooting into the sun. I chose f/16 so as to get maximum depth of field.

To the left is one of the images that I started out with, before any processing.

I had purposely exposed to the right so as to make sure and not lose any shadow detail in any part of the image. Some people recommend underexposing sunset shots to get those vibrant colors, but I disagree. That’s fine if you only want silhouettes, but if you want to be able to see the foreground, you really must make the exposure as bright as possible. Remember, you can always darken a bright image (if it’s not blown out), but brightening a dark image will end up with a noisy turd. You can see from the histogram above that there is a tiny bit of the image that is blown out (it was a very small part of the sky) and most of the tones in the image are in the middle to high end. I shot in RAW (as I always do), planning on bringing the exposure down later. For me, RAW is always the way to go – not because I can “fix my screw ups” later – but because I can expose the image in such a way that I maximize the signal to noise ratio and can get great colors and skies. Ken Rockwell can go and tell me all day why I should be shooting JPG, but I understand the limitations of both and still pick RAW every day of the week. I’m glad it works for him, but RAW fits my workflow far better.

To the right is the image I ended up with after some Lightroom tweaks. Aside from some minor cropping and rotating (the horizon wasn’t level, despite my best efforts on site), I added a 1 stop software GND, increased vibrance and clarity, and added a small vignette. That’s about all.

Let me know what you think!