Icicles
January 26, 2009
When I started studying photography in college my first class overlapped with winter. Most of the class was devastated because it meant that they couldn’t continue to take photos of things like flowers, trees and people outside in nature. I was the same way at first, but then I realized that photography is what you make of it. You can find interesting things anywhere you go at any time of the year; you just have to look harder at certain times.
This photo is one of those cases. I’m reminded that even during winter in Michigan when everything is solid white with snow and you don’t want to go outside that there are things to photograph. Part of it is being there, part of it is just looking for it.
Photo Details
Camera: Nikon D80
Exposure: 1/800 (0.001 sec)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 135 mm
ISO Speed: 200
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Comments
Jan 26, 10:19 AM
Rob: It was actually a rather cloudy day and so I was having to shoot as the sun came out from behind the clouds. Even then I had a group of trees between the house and the sun so the light was already broken down a bit before it got to the icicles. 5.6 is the maximum aperture for that particular lens at its fully zoomed state, so I guess I could have closed it down and slowed the shutter but I wasn’t seeing much of a difference when I was messing around with things and I wanted to be cautious about losing my highlights with the snow.
The vignetting at the top was mostly the result of shooting from a second story window directly under the house’s overhang. I had some images in the same series that were much more drastic as far as the top vignetting goes, though in the end I preferred it to be a little more subtle. Good questions!
And I should mention that I shoot with a custom saturation level that changes the appearance of the colors. In this case it gave it an almost antique color set that also pulled down the natural contrast a touch. That could be another reason this photo is hard to place on the cloudy/sunny range.
Rob Meeks
Jan 26, 09:56 AM
Question – would shooting with a larger aperture have made much of a difference with this photo? Hard to tell how sunny/not sunny it was by the pic, just wondering.
Also – is the vignetting natural?