The last couple of mornings have been magical! Heavy frost clung to everything. Brilliant sunshine danced off the lacy crystals creating a spectacular light show. Photos simply can not replicate the brilliance and intensity of such conditions. In the image below, the tiny pink dots are crystals reflecting the sunlight.
I’m delighted to share with you a little bit of detail. If you would like to download the image for your desktop, you can find specific screen resolutions here.
Category: Nature
Gooseberry Falls
Recently we did a road trip covering 4400 km. It took us completely around both Lake Superior and Lake Huron. It was part business, part pleasure. Of course I had my photo gear along but did not have the opportunities I had hoped for some photo shoots. One stop we specifically made was at Gooseberry Falls MN just north up Hwy 61 from Duluth MN. It had been more than 30 years since my last hike along the river there; so long ago, I had completely forgotten about it. We drive by that spot many times every year but had not taken any time for a very long time.
Okay, enough talk. Here are the falls just below the bridge on Hwy 61 this October.
Ah, aren’t they pretty! If any of you have been there, you might not recognize them like this. I’m certain they must usually be part of a raging, roaring river!
I was very happy to find them so gentle, so soft. Especially when I took note of the ravine and what the absence of water revealed!
Hold fast!
shades of (not so) grey
Here’s a screen shot in Lightroom, before and after view, of my not so black and white misty morning image.
The saturation slider (last slider in the adjustment panel on right hand side) was moved all the way to the left removing all colour.
In Photoshop, we can look at the pixels up close. Using the colour picker tool, we can select an area of the image to see what the colour is. I hovered the eyedropper over a grey part of the image just above and to the right of the dialogue box and clicked. I tried this in a number of areas of the image with consistent results. (When I attempted a screen shot capture to share my findings, the eyedropper vanished from the screen! The image below was shot with my iPhone!)
Did you guess the hint of colour is orange? Darker shades of orange become brown and when added to an image create a sepia or aged look.
So my original image had a natural infusion of sepia!
mist at dawn
Straight out of the camera, this scene appears to be shades of black and white.
When I reduce the saturation to zero in Lightroom, any hint of colour is removed and the image looks like this:
So what is the colour that tints the original image? I took the image into PhotoShop to take a closer look. With the colour selector dialogue box open, I can use the eyedropper tool to click on an area of the image to see what colour that pixel or pixels hold. To which colour do you think the grey shades are related?
light at the end
the other beaver
Most of you know when I talk about the pictures I take of the Beaver I am referring to the kind that flies, that was built by de Havialland Canada and most likely is the yellow one on floats we own (G-GZBR). This time I am sharing a shot I got of the other kind of beaver, the furry, swimming, ambitious rodent.
While out calling moose this fall… Perhaps a little explanation might be useful here: Brad & I trek into the ‘bush’ on a calm, crisp fall afternoon he with a fiberglass bugle-looking horn and me with my camera gear. We hunker down along the edge of a clearing or pond several car lengths apart, then Brad moans and grunts through the horn hoping to convince a bull moose that a love-sick cow moose is ready and waiting. Then we wait and wait and listen and wait some more. Although this day Brad was successful in immediately getting an audible response (loud crashing of antlers in the trees), the bull refused to come out of hiding. The activity caught the attention of a beaver who appeared from out of his lodge across the pond and floated toward me then across in front of Brad just down shore then back again. He zig-zagged several times getting closer each time. We didn’t appear to be a love-sick moose or any kind of threat so he simply returned home to reassure his family everything was fine.
You can see by the ripples on the water, he had come from the right and turned sharply to look me straight in the eye.
He sat so perfectly still while I took the picture I was able to get a nice crisp shot. I think he was trying to get a good sniff of me, too!
Karen Greaves Photography & Fibre Art 