Snow in Central Texas (such as it was)

adbsgicom

On the 4th, the news predicted an inch. I think we had about 20 flakes in the end, but that still got my daughter and friend very excited to run out and 'play' in the snow.... The snow barely showed up in some pictures, and I found the B/W treatment seemed to work best for allowing the snow to be seen.

1.


2.


C&C welcome and appreciated....

sweet caroline

I love the look of wonder on their faces.

I was in parent teacher conferences when the snow came, but I could see it through my wall of windows:) Let me know if you want to see my "snow" picture;)

Caroline

Agnieszka

Haha. Very cute photos!

Let me know whenever you think you'd like to have some more of it .... I'm sure we'll have more than I can handle this year

Moogle Pepper

Whoa! It does snow in Texas!

They look happy in the snow... they should come to the east coast. I am sure we will have plenty to spare!

adbsgicom

Caroline, I'd love to see your "snow" pic.
Angie, where are you located?
Moogie, yeah, actually a good chunk of Texas can get some snow, especially up toward Abeliene. Here, in central Texas we can get it, but it is usually short-lived. Two years ago, we socked in for 2 days by an ice storm that layed about 1/4-1/2 inch of ice over the whole city. It was very cool (literally), but a bit of a mess. We don't have halite to melt it all away....

Thanks for looking, y'all....

-a

toddb

nice pics
Enjoyed the pics Andrew -- the fact that you can barely see a handful of flakes makes it all the better. Nice shots....maybe I'll upload a couple from the 16.5-inch snow storm we got here in Iowa Tues-Wed. Know any nice homes for sale in Texas?

l.k.madison

We got snow, too!!
It snows in Central Texas just like it snows in South Louisiana!!!

We got 5 1/2 inches at my house December 11, 2008, and exactly 51 weeks later, we got a trace again on December 4, 2009. This year's wasn't a lot, but enough to have a mini-snowball fight with what we scraped off the car.

Hubby left Dallas last Thursday for work with a 100% chance of snow for Friday - and who got the snow? Not him!! We called him while it was snowing and completely rubbed it in his face.

Makes ya kinda doubt all that Global Warming garbage doesn't it?

Definitely use the one of your daughter for your Christmas cards, it's such a Winter Wonderland! Such gorgeous pictures!

nightpixels

Great job, Andrew! Awesome pictures!

Memories by Melinda

Both shots are great but I absolutely love #2. Her expression as she looks up is priceless.

adbsgicom

Todd, lots of nice homes in Texas... Though not the steal it was once, home prices are still pretty reasonable in many areas, and if you want to be out of the cities, even more so. When we left upstate NY to head to TX, there was about 4' of standing snow on the ground. We haven't missed that...

L.K... Thanks.

Allan, Thanks.

Melinda, thanks. Why is it that I seem to capture the greatest expression on the not-daughter kids...?

Any other feedback on the B/W conversion. I'm still trying to figure it out.

My flow was using the LR defaults with, pushing the exposure to get their faces bumped, using the recovery to save the blowout on the jackets some and using the brush to bring the exposure back down on the jackets to near +1/3. I left the contrast curve on medium here but brought up the blacks a bit.

I think I may have had the sharpening in LR set to high here, and the net results are a little over-sharp (at least around the hair). I recently learned that LR uses an adaptive sharpening algorithm based on the output size, so outputting to 800 pixels directly didn't require strong sharpening because it will already crank it up more because of the compression.

Joe Dukovac

Hey Andrew,

Great job on the conversions I like, well, I like them both. I was looking at them trying to figure out which on I liked the best, but I think they are both equally good! (It would have been nice if the finger tips hadn't been cut off in the first one

I remember when it snowed in Florida one year, and I mean SNOWED. We must have gotten about 1 1/2 inches on the cars in about 1/2 hour, then it melted right away, but still it was nice. Now that we are back in Canada (Montreal to be more specific), we got about 12 -15 inches of snow on Wednesday and more on the way! I'm such a Northern Guy!

Great job!

Take Care,
Joe

adbsgicom

Thanks, Joe. They were jumping around quite a bit, and I didn't get her framed the way I would have liked. I need to just shoot wider in these cases and crop to suit in post. Her friend's expressions in several of the images is just complete wonderment. Her mom was kinda bummed that she wasn't with her to share the snow time, but appreciated the photo documentation of the event.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, had an multi-building high-school campus (meaning that we had to go outside to get from class to class), and went to college at Pitt. I'm happy to have very short bouts of snow, and enjoy others' pictures of the white stuff. Anytime we've considered moving, any place with significant snow is out of the question. I'll take the hot summers as fair trade.

divamum

These are such fun, Andrew! Definitely a time to be glad that dad was at home, and a good photographer If you have 6 or so, will they make a nice collage set? That could be a very fun keeper for the wall!

I have found that some of the LR bw presets I have do a better job than I can. I have looked and looked and can't always figure out what the presets are doing that I don't manually, but on some shots - and it varies, because some I CAN do it better myself - the presets not only speed things up, but tweak something I haven't figured out yet, and the results are better. I d'load pretty much every free bw preset/action I can get my hands on - I use them a lot (sometimes in combination) and then adjust them from there. It's nice to have a "library" of them now.

I also have Rutt's bw Photoshop action (search Finishing school for "gorman" which will probably pull up the link), and I like the one in the TRA demo set as well.

Of course, sometimes it just works better if I do it myself.

I'm a bw junkie, clearly

Agnieszka

adbsgicom wrote:

Angie, where are you located?

In Boston ...

adbsgicom

Agnieszka wrote:

In Boston ...

We have friends up in Gloucester. We get up there every couple of years. Last time was in the fall; that's the part of the NE I really miss -- fall colors. Stay warm....

jeffreaux2

.....Burr.....

We got a shot of that same storm in Baton Rouge...also on the fourth.

...and the following NIGHT I had to shoot an OUTDOOR wedding...

It was still pretty chilly!


Fun shots.....but....why not in color?...to REALLY show the snow!

Agnieszka

adbsgicom wrote:

We have friends up in Gloucester. We get up there every couple of years. Last time was in the fall; that's the part of the NE I really miss -- fall colors. Stay warm....

Ohhhh, I looove Gloucester!!! Such a pretty place, would love to live there! Yeah, the fall colors are definitely pretty .... but this year fall was wet and cold, there wasn't much of that perfect New England Fall this year :cry

adbsgicom

divamum wrote:

These are such fun, Andrew! Definitely a time to be glad that dad was at home, and a good photographer If you have 6 or so, will they make a nice collage set? That could be a very fun keeper for the wall!

I have found that some of the LR bw presets I have do a better job than I can. I have looked and looked and can't always figure out what the presets are doing that I don't manually, but on some shots - and it varies, because some I CAN do it better myself - the presets not only speed things up, but tweak something I haven't figured out yet, and the results are better. I d'load pretty much every free bw preset/action I can get my hands on - I use them a lot (sometimes in combination) and then adjust them from there. It's nice to have a "library" of them now.

I also have Rutt's bw Photoshop action (search Finishing school for "gorman" which will probably pull up the link), and I like the one in the TRA demo set as well.

Of course, sometimes it just works better if I do it myself.

I'm a bw junkie, clearly

Given the slew of collages that came through recently, its odd that doing something like that didn't even enter my mind . There are a couple good ones, might be able to do at least a triptych. I haven't really gotten on board the whole preset thing. I need to get into that mode since there is a certain amount of repetition involved in doing things, but I guess that since LR allows easy application of the processing, I tend to get one right, and then sync what I changed and tweak. Sort of a big hammer approach.

adbsgicom

jeffreaux2 wrote:

.....Burr.....

We got a shot of that same storm in Baton Rouge...also on the fourth.

...and the following NIGHT I had to shoot an OUTDOOR wedding...

It was still pretty chilly!


Fun shots.....but....why not in color?...to REALLY show the snow!

Still kinda chilly around here. Highs in the 40's. 20 years out of the NE, 40 seems chilly (used to be shorts weather...).

As for color, dunno, they seemed to lack a little something in color. What do you think?

1. My daughter


2. Friend


3. Catching flakes...

rwells

Hey Andrew,

Fun shots, and we got a dusting up here too. D/FW

I pretty much use that same basic workup in LR for B&W sometimes. It gives a crisp conversion, if that's what your picture calls for.

Remember: In LR, once you tweak a process, simply save it as a "User Preset". Build your own library. It'll save you a bunch of time

Jeremy Winterberg

At home in Wisconsin my parents were in a huge snowstorm this past week. they got over 13 inches of snow in a few hours. Gov. Doyle put all of Wisconsin in a "state of emergency" that way if needed the National Guard could help. Pretty much every school and business was closed down for a couple days. Here in Indiana we got maybe an inch the same day they were snowed in.

I definitely like the B&W more. It makes it look cold outside vs sunny and warm in the color images. Also you can see the flakes better in the BW like you said.

sweet caroline

Okay, here's my "snow" photo, created at my youngest daughter's request.

adbsgicom

Jeremy, thanks. Stay warm....
Caroline, cute shot. The b/w in the background makes the snow seem a bit more present. I assume the background was more green than white....

sweet caroline

adbsgicom wrote:

Jeremy, thanks. Stay warm....
Caroline, cute shot. The b/w in the background makes the snow seem a bit more present. I assume the background was more green than white....

Maybe just a bit more green;) This was shot at Mayfield Park Thanksgiving weekend.

Caroline

kidzmom

Nice Andrew! No pun intended but I love how you "froze" the snow!! Often it falls and blurs if you don't make an effort to catch it! Love the wonder and excitement too.. You captured both emotion and detail. WTG!

adbsgicom

Caroline: Guess you got the browns out, then....
Kidzmom: Thanks. All of these shots were done with flash as fill. Most of them were done with HSS, so these couple were all shot a 1/400s. Why not all, because I didn't think of HSS until after shooting the first couple of shots and saying, "Dang, I wish I could go faster than 1/200 -- oh I can and they aren't very far away from me, so this isn't an issue..."