It almost was no-blog Friday. I want to look through all the images in took in last few weeks and pick up some stock uploads. I checked the blog to see the stats, and here it is – no post scheduled for today! I new it will happen, I am so busy recently, that I am scheduling most of the content on weekends for the following week, and then forget about it until I have time next weekend.
Either way, we took some neighborhood photowalk last Saturday, and this is one of my favorites of the day.

We took a short walk around our neighborhood. Overnight, although it was not snowing, I think, the tress got covered in snow, so it was white not only on the ground, but also wherever you looked. Quite beautiful, indeed. This macro Lensbaby shot of the large snow flakes covered rope along snowmobile trail is my favorite of the day.
BTW, interesting tidbit in here, looks like yesterday all states but Hawaii were snow-covered.

Another DPS monthly critique and edit challenge. Another picture not taken by me, only edited by me. This time, the task was far more difficult for me to approach, as on the first glance, I didn’t like the image at all. What was bothering me were the hanging pieces of fabric, worn and far too colorful to my taste. However, I operated under the assumption that they are there for a reason, and decided to go with them. Mostly because cloning them out requires too much patience, which I don’t have .

I looked at different cropping though,  and decided to put more focus on sky and the far right, highest peak. The easiest way to do it was to make it portrait. I opened shadows by making a the single image-HDR, and added a lot of blacks to recover lost contrast. A bit of vignette to put focus on snow-covered mountain and rags. The final touch was to lower saturation of reds (-67, not too much), which made the colorful rags less distracting.

It was a beautiful day, I was off work, I was running errands and just had my iPhone with me. I took a number of images of those berries, all around town, and was so disappointed when I uploaded them on my computer. Side note- I never put an iPhone image on blog before I see it on a big screen. What happened, and what I have not seen on the small screen on the iPhone was how dark the berries came out- there was too much contrast between overcast sky and them. So I took my big camera and retraced my steps, to take the images I wanted!

I was not using my iPhone camera recently too much. As I mentioned before, the noise in low light situations was driving me nuts, and I was hardy ever outside during the day. Really the first occasion came today, when I went to run some errands and saw those beautiful red berries covered with light snow which came out absolutely unexpectedly in the morning. Those below I was able to photograph nicely with my small camera, but it did not work for the large berries on the trees because of the contrast between them and the sky- for those I went home to grab the big camera, and I will post them on some other occasion.

After spending the whole holiday season, figuring out @ and # of Twitter, trying polls and contests and new types of content to increase blog exposure, it was really nice to sit down and relax with the basics photographic concepts. And the basic this time is “Examples. The making of 40 photographs” by Ansel Adams. As much as I am not a film shooter, and most of details are lost on me, the anecdotes are very engaging. I am also fascinated, obviously, by images in the book. Especially looking at the photographs like “El Captain, Winter Sunrise” and “Mount McKinley and Wonder Like” I wonder, if we really need HDR, which I seemed to be so overusing recently. I really can appreciate the scenes on those images with the contract between close to pitch dark shadows (with just a bit of detail, barely distinguishable) and the light of the mountains.
I was thinking abut this experience again, when I took and processed the image below, which has its own history.
Snow drift would be the proper term for it. But last week, after we got several inches of snow on top of already many inches of snow this winter, and some wind just after that, I was watching the snow on out lawn. It made me think about the sand dunes. They look so similar to the formations made of snow. We took the camera, and went to look for the dunes made of snow around town, well, more like outside town. I took some beautiful images, trying to find frames and angles without points of reference to their size. This is one of my favorites. I couldn’t resist turning it into cyanotype, although it was almost blue and white by itself. But then I felt it needs some tweaking, as I wanted to see the difference between lights and shadows, and make the shapes of snow well visible. The final result is almost what I wanted when I visualized this project.

One thing I realized taking all those pictures with my iPhone for last several months is that it performs awfully in low light situations. I follow thebestcamera.com feed, and it doesn’t seem to be a deal breaker for all those pictures, but it bothers me nevertheless. Anyway, I decided to post something far less grainy this time, I took this picture one of freezing days this winter, freshly after snow fall. I have been trying to picture the newly arrived winter, an that detail shot did it for me.

Last Saturday it was snowing in Iowa. The leaves just started to turn yellow and red, and already got covered in snow. We have been running some errands just before our trip for a family wedding, and I grabbed this photo on the street.

I found this photo somewhere in old and forgotten catalog (from end of last year ), and simply couldn’t resist. I mean, why the wild-life photos have to be so calm and dignifying? Plus, how many times you really see the wild animals do something some intimate, you would think?

Since I didn’t have a macro lens with me, this was the biggest magnification I could get, and it was the closest I could get. But… By getting rid of color (and few other corrections in this ready Lightroom preset I used, downloaded long time ago from Lightroom Killer Tips), and then some tweaking, I got some interesting photo out of it.