I’m a little bit late again. Three of these images are from yesterday, I guess it’s obvious which one is not.
It’s late Saturday morning, I’m in Carinthia, and compared to what I see here, the snow in Vienna is negligible. On the other hand, big cities have their own dynamics and are much more vulnerable to snow, and so the meager 20 cm of snow in Vienna cause all sorts of delays.
I remember a winter six years ago. It was the first year of photography for me, then with a 5 megapixel bridge cam by Kodak, and I was absolutely desperate. We had snow similar to what we have now (more than 60 cm here in Villach), and it would not end before mid-April. Well, it’s much too early to judge, but Winter’s start was certainly impressive this year.
That certain year I was yearning for color and for images like that one on the left.
You may remember that I had some trouble last week with image alignment in HDR programs. I had resorted to Photoshop, and that’s what I tried again yesterday night.
This is just a leftover image from June, an HDR that I never made and that had some severe flare problems, and although I don’t like the image (for severe lack of composition, to begin with), I do like the Photoshop HDR process. Together with tools like Topaz Adjust, Topaz Detail, and with the original exposures partially blended in with masks (how else would you get believable water?), this makes for an extremely flexible workflow.
But then, even in Winter, and probably especially in Winter, you only have to be at the right place at the right time, and you will be given all the colors you want. This can be a nightly city like in the last post, or it can even be a platform in a train station. That’s what I really learned in the last years: just look closer. Not every snow is white, not every light in winter is flat.
OK, I have to stop now and go shopping. It’s snowing stronger again, but I’ll take the camera and try to give you an impression of what it looks like here in Vienna.
The Song of the Day is “Cold Moments” from Paul Weller’s 2008 album “22 Dreams”. Hear it on YouTube.