Frosty Winter Landscape

With snow on the ground and the sky starting to clear after a foggy morning, I was treated to trees that were coated in frost making for a beautiful winter landscape. I put on my boots and a warm coat before heading outdoors with the camera to get the frost on the trees before it melted away.

I started shooting with the D90 using the 18-105mm lense and then switched to the wide angle 12-24mm when I hit the river. When walking about I didn’t use a tripod but once I got down to the river, I needed slower shutter speeds for the waterfall so I put the camera on the Slik tripod. Aperture priority was used on the camera with an aperture of f11 to f18 to get good depth of field. To be able to adjust the white balance in a difficult shooting situation with the snow, I choice to shoot in RAW to change the wb later in post processing.

The white balance was changed in ViewNX to direct sunlight along with changing the picture control to nature-landscape or monchr_g+con. I also adjusted the contrast and highlight slider to keep the snow from getting blown out in some of the images. Once in PSE8, levels and hue/saturation layer masks adjustments were used to get the colors that I desired. To sharpen the images, I copied the main image layer and then adjusted it with a high pass sharpen filter. I then changed the blend mode and opacity level to the desired amount.

By the time I started to head home, the wind was blowing the frost off the trees but I had already captured the images and with this crazy winter we are having, I’m glad I put on the boots and coat to head outside.

#1. Used a Cloud Brush for the sky

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 #5. Hole #12 at LPN

 #6. Hole #3 at LPN

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