First Snow of the Season...

CTUphoto

I spent the early hours of the morning looking at other posts on here....got me quite inspired to do something today. Then the snow began--first of the Season for Northern VA. Shot the first set of them ogling the falling white stuff through the back window. Not quite sure I nailed the effect I wanted but any chance I had of perfecting it went out the backdoor with them as they layered up and headed out to the porch.

In a creative mood? Maybe. Willing to brave the cold, wet snow with them? Not so much. So aside from the window silhouettes I shot all of the following images through my back porch window. To add to the challenge of craning my lens around the window dividers, the snow was playing heck on the auto focus so all of this was done in manual, while the kids were sprinting from one spot to another. I admit to needing a lot more work using MF on fast moving subjects--I don't think I nailed the focus on a single one.

Focus issues aside, any C&C is more than welcome.

Oh...Happy to say I shot all of this in raw. I recently bought an iMac, but had to swap back to my Windows laptop to do all the PP (no editing software on my mac yet). I didn't do too much to the silhouette shots other than adjust the crop. On the outside shots, almost all had to have a little color tweaking. As this was done on my laptop, I'll just say I'm not sure how accurate/appealing the colors/skintones really are. Guess it's time to hop over to my Mac to see how they came out.

All but the one wide angle porch shot were done with a Canon 100mm Macro lens.

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11. (with the 10-22mm....this was before the kids headed out...it's completely snow covered now....think we've gotten about 3.5 inches or so)


12. (these are the trees you can see in the window on the silhouette shots above)



Brrr...

Cheers!

~jb

jeffreaux2

I like #3 best....

A suggestion from me (since I have all the experience here shooting snow.... )....would be to up your shutter speed to freeze the snow. Giving you flakes instead of streaks. Not an easy task I know, but.....

...and you exposed the outside portion of those sillouettes just about right. A tiny bit of flash...with a warming gel would have really offered a different look......Outdoor coolness and indoor warmth.

Masonlaw1

Great shots! That's not Piedmont is it?

CTUphoto

Masonlaw1 wrote:

Great shots! That's not Piedmont is it?

Wow....good eye!

~jb

CTUphoto

jeffreaux2 wrote:

I like #3 best....

A suggestion from me (since I have all the experience here shooting snow.... )....would be to up your shutter speed to freeze the snow. Giving you flakes instead of streaks. Not an easy task I know, but.....

...and you exposed the outside portion of those sillouettes just about right. A tiny bit of flash...with a warming gel would have really offered a different look......Outdoor coolness and indoor warmth.

Thanks for the advice on the silhouette shots Jeff. Working with my flash is something I really need to do more of (along with a hundred other things:D ). I did try a couple of those same shots with my 420ex turned on---actually tried that first---but they came out completely blown out. Not sure what I had set wrong, especially considering I was ~25 feet away from them (had to move way back to fit them all in with the 100mm Macro I was using). Something to work on, for sure though. Thx!

~jb

divamum

I think these are fun!

One thing you might want to try in post with the outdoor shots is to boost the contrast in them - right now they're a little flat. I think if you play around with white/black points on the other computer you may pull some more "pop" out of them.

Sadly, I didn't get to play in the snow yesterday as I got stuck having to be out on the road in it (child was away from home and I had to get her, way out in the countryside so it was BAD). We're a state or so north of you and got hit pretty bad, especially since it was kind of out of nowhere!

kidzmom

I love 3! Very cute idea!!!