Winter - When the conditions hit, take the shot!

Zone99

C&C please.

But first, a little back story on this shot:

I had tried this once before with my daughter last year with another coat she had. It was inside and it came out OK but it wasn't quite what I wanted. The coat, a gift, didn't fit so we returned it.

This year, while Christmas shopping, I bought a sweatshirt with a faux fur hood with the intention of trying this again but I still needed to have the mood in mind that I wanted (am I the only one who drives to work constantly thinking about a particular shot and obsessing about it until I get it? Doubt it! ).

The other day, while driving by the local pond, the temperature differential between the ice and the air caused a lot of low fog on the ice. That's what I was looking for. I darted home and told my daughter to grab her coat and earrings and then grabbed my other daughter to enlist her aid with a reflector (it was overcast but I figured I'd need it).

I ran out the door to my wife yelling: "Where are you going?! She has to leave in 30 minutes!" My response, of course: "we'll be back in 25!!" .

Zipped down, ran through a few shots and poses and I think this is the best of the bunch.

While the background is blown out, that's actually what I was looking for. The pond was too long to get a muted background in that would make sense and the fog too thick to get any distinctions from the levels of fog.




A couple of notes:

• one thing I need to learn to get rid of is the dark circles under her eyes. I think that's going to require photoshop.
• there has been very little adjustment done. Some black level, some whitening of the eyes, a couple of blemish removals
• The reflector I used was a 40" reflector and was my first time using it. I bought a 5-in-1 kit as a Christmas present for myself (even wrapped it and gave it to my wife to give to me!) :wink
• Lessons learned: When the conditions hit, don't waste time, take the shot!!

adbsgicom

I like this a lot. I think it could use a little additional sharpening, but it is quite nice!
The dark areas are easy to fix in photoshop, do you have access to it, or not?

Zone99

adbsgicom wrote: »

I like this a lot. I think it could use a little additional sharpening, but it is quite nice!
The dark areas are easy to fix in photoshop, do you have access to it, or not?

I do. I just got it a few weeks ago.

If you have any tips or pointers to examples and tutorials, I'd really appreciate it.

Where would you apply the sharpening? All over or parts of the face or eyes or.....?


Thanks.

adbsgicom

Check out this link for Dgrin Photo Tutorials. Great place to start.
You might not want the skin sharpened, but the fur and eyes could use it. There are about a dozen ways to sharpen in Photoshop; I haven't seen a compare of all them or what the upside of each method is. Key thing is always do it in another layer so you can mask off parts you don't want, and dial in the opacity of the sharpening.