As we enter the last days of March, spring is truly upon us. No matter what the weather may throw at us, the Spring Equinox has come and the season has changed. Sunny warmer days with the emergence of leaves and flowers is not far off ... but before I get there with my photography, I have one image from the frigid depths of winter that I'd like to share.
Back in January, while looking after the farm for the youngin's, with a major winter storm forecast to slam Eastern Ontario, an idea for an image came to mind. With a fresh blanket of snow, I had thoughts of a night shot with the lights of the house glowing in the pitch black of night. Well ... add in blizzard like conditions with extremely heavy snow blowing off the roof of the workshop and here you have it !
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| ' on a dark winter's night ' |
And here's the backstory ...
In the weeks and months leading up to my time at the farm, I was hoping for wintry, snowy conditions as they would figure prominently in my plans for photography. As luck would have it, the snow came and in a healthy dumping starting earlier one day and continued through that night.
After dinner, with cousin Steve who had come for dinner and a first visit to see the place I had talked so much about, I went around flicking on the interior and exterior lights. Then we donned the warm winter gear, checked for a charged battery plus a spare, grabbed the camera, tripod and headed out. Trekking down the lane and around the garden area I wanted undisturbed in the foreground, we made our way to the corner by the cedar rail fence. I set up a couple of compositions I liked and captured a number of frames for each, varying exposure so they could be combined in post processing to control the dynamic range of the scene. Done, I picked up the gear and headed in to continue with the after dinner conversation and adult beverages.
When I got around to processing the captured files a few days later, I was met with an unexpected challenge. For the composition I preferred, I had not captured an exposure where the brightness of exterior lights of the workshop were controlled. The lights and workshop wall were blown out beyond recovery in all the frames I had made. Undaunted, I grabbed one from another composition, fiddled for quite a while to manually adjusted the size and perspective to suit my preferred composition and meticulously aligned it as a layer with the others in Photoshop. Then I blended the portions of several frames together, adjusted exposure, highlights, shadows using a variety of steps in several work sessions.
All of this done, in the end I wish I had spent a little more time in preparation for the outing, paid more attention to the images as I was capturing them and confirmed rather than assumed that I had captured everything I needed. I normally don't spend as much time processing my images as I did for this one but still, I'm very pleased with the result even though there is room for improvement.
DJE
