Another from the Swiss archives, though a square crop from another image. I like the contrast of the tree shapes with the planar mountain form behind. The light brown grey Titanium toning works well for the entire image and I think gives it feeling of cold and winter.
This was definitely one of those "channeling Mr. Adams" sorts of images, turning out pretty much exactly as I had visualized it when I took it.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Snow Trees II
This image is one from the Swiss archives. The first weekend weekend in March 2006, I took the train from Luzern to Lauterbrunnen. The intent of the weekend was to visit the Jungfraujoch. While I did make it to the top, it was near white out conditions and photography was less than optimal.
The night before my trip back home to Thalwil there was a deep, wet snow - perhaps 16" or so - that blanketed most of Switzerland and Germany. The led to train delays while the tracks were cleared and transmission wires repaired where necessary. As a result of those delays I was stuck for about fourty five minutes or so on the train near the town of Dulliken not too far outside of Zurich.
These trees formed the edge of the forest not far from the railroad siding in Dulliken. At mid-morning, it was still cold enough and the snow was wet and sticky enough that it had not yet melted off the branches, leaving this delightful treescape.
At the time this was shot, I had not yet understood the advantages of shooting in RAW format and so the original of this image is a jpeg unfortunately. The post processing here was fairly minimal - I was going for a nice white snow against the black trees and a toned sky - so after a basic levelling I took the image into the Nik AgEfx software for black and white conversion. Fooling around with different film profiles led to a 100 speed Agfa film that had a really nice set of grays for this image. My intent was to do my usual double platinum toning but on a lark I tried the Titanium toning profile in the AgEfx software. Whoa - very cool! It made the snow on the trees just glow and brought up the darkly looming shape of the mountain behind really well. After some leveling and a little sharpening, the final image was reformatted to jpeg.
I'm really quite happy with this image. It looks especially good on black and has let me to try reworking a number of my swiss landscapes using the combination of the Agfa film profile and a Titanium toning process.
The night before my trip back home to Thalwil there was a deep, wet snow - perhaps 16" or so - that blanketed most of Switzerland and Germany. The led to train delays while the tracks were cleared and transmission wires repaired where necessary. As a result of those delays I was stuck for about fourty five minutes or so on the train near the town of Dulliken not too far outside of Zurich.
These trees formed the edge of the forest not far from the railroad siding in Dulliken. At mid-morning, it was still cold enough and the snow was wet and sticky enough that it had not yet melted off the branches, leaving this delightful treescape.
At the time this was shot, I had not yet understood the advantages of shooting in RAW format and so the original of this image is a jpeg unfortunately. The post processing here was fairly minimal - I was going for a nice white snow against the black trees and a toned sky - so after a basic levelling I took the image into the Nik AgEfx software for black and white conversion. Fooling around with different film profiles led to a 100 speed Agfa film that had a really nice set of grays for this image. My intent was to do my usual double platinum toning but on a lark I tried the Titanium toning profile in the AgEfx software. Whoa - very cool! It made the snow on the trees just glow and brought up the darkly looming shape of the mountain behind really well. After some leveling and a little sharpening, the final image was reformatted to jpeg.
I'm really quite happy with this image. It looks especially good on black and has let me to try reworking a number of my swiss landscapes using the combination of the Agfa film profile and a Titanium toning process.
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