Thursday, December 26, 2013

Christmas Day Photos

If you're looking for family photos I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place :-) We got together with family on Christmas Eve and the evening of Christmas day, leaving Christmas morning to relax and to head out with my camera at sunrise. Thankfully it wasn't too cold.

I like going out to take photos in the winter - there always seems to be something to try to capture - snow, ice, frost, water, reflections, ducks, dry grass. The bare trees and the snow make it less "cluttered" than summer time. And sunrise and sunset are at civilized times :-)

It wasn't an especially spectacular sunrise, but there were enough clouds to make it interesting and give some good color in spots. And to provide some color for reflections. There were quite a few tracks in the snow but the only animals I saw were a few ducks (common goldeneye, I think).

As usual, click to view larger

sunrise

sunrise

duck and reflections

The close-ups of the ice and water don't have much color anyway so they might as well be black & white. (Although I added a slight blue tint.)

ice and water

There were lots of track leading from the water - beavers coming to feed on the bushes beside the river:

beaver tracks

The bushes were still plastered with recent snow:

snow plastered bushes

I like to shoot the dead grass backlit, and in this case with the reflections of the sunrise in the background:

grass in the snow

In this next one I wasn't sure if it would look better with the tree in focus or the moon in focus so I took two shots. I ended up wanting both in focus, so I used Photoshop to focus stack the two images. (A pretty simple case.)

half moon over the trees

I took 269 photos in about an hour of wandering around. Of course, then I spent multiple additional hours editing and processing them.

See all 32 photos as a slideshow or overview

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