Waking lake

[purplehaze]

Lake Winnipeg is waking from its slumber and making all sorts of squeaks and creaks and tinkles and moans. I am so glad I had the opportunity to get out this weekend and see and hear it.

This is just a small selection of shots I took. I am sure they could be better processed, but I am at a bit of a loss as to what direction to take them in. I am finding a lot of that finer detail just feels like clutter. All were shot with the Tamron 24-70 mm on the D750.

#1



f/11 @ 1/80, 100 ISO, 26 mm

#2



f/11 at 1/50, 100 ISO, 26 mm

#3



f/11 @ 1/160, 100 ISO, 24 mm

#4



f/11 @ 1/80, 100 ISO, 70 mm

[Wavelength]

A set of awesome images...really liked them all!!!

[Geoff F]

I see what you mean about a loss of fine detail, Janis, particularly in the first and last images but I can't get any information about camera settings from the exif data.

Possibly not exactly focused correctly or maybe the light angle? Second and third images look good.

[purplehaze]

Thanks, Nandakumar! Geoff, I deliberately reduced clarity and structure on #1, as the image looked better to me without all the fine detail. My complaint about many of the images I shot that day is that they just have too much fine detail. The fourth image has less DOF than the others as it was shot at the narrow end of the lens. I will add the EXIF data, but I think everything was shot at f/11. I think maybe I should just crop #4 down from the top to eliminate the majority of the OOF area. I think the foreground is okay, is it not?

[Manfred M]

Janis - these are all good images, but I understand where you are coming from. Let me leave you with a couple of thoughts / ideas.

The first one comes from the famed photojournalist, Robert Capa, when he said "If your image isn't good enough, you're not close enough".

The second is a pointer I picked up a couple of years ago, when we had one of curators from the National Gallery of Canada as a speaker at one of the photo clubs I belong to. She was there to discuss how she put together the Anthropocene exhibit that had many photographs done by Edward Burtynsky. One thing she pointed out about his technique is that he often photographs his landscapes so that the sky is not appear in his image. I started trying that in some of my own work and found it can be a very effective approach.

The first image is fine and serves as an establishing shot and the last one already gets in tight (you might want to try cropping even tighter and concentrate on the ice crystal structure. I suspect the middle two will be stronger without the sky and the third one might need a bit of the bottom cropped as well.

[purplehaze]

Food for thought, Manfred. Thanks.