Photographing Falling Snow

And Getting Rid of the Blotches

It is a wonderful, but also occasionally painful fact that landscape photography is often at its best when the weather is at its worse.  This is certainly true when it comes to shooting the winter storms.  Whether gently settling or blown by ferocious winter gales, falling snow drops a lovely veil on any winter scene, but capturing the storm imposes a whole new set of opportunities and challenges.  These include both the practical difficulties of managing the cold and wet, and  also dealing with the fact that snow can appear completely differently depending on setting that are chosen in camera.

Practical Problems 
The physical problems include keeping the camera, warm and dry and avoiding or removing the snow flakes that are inevitably attracted to the lens.  Simple preventive measures such as the use of a lens hood and avoiding aiming the camera directly into the flying snow can be very helpful, but in heavy snow I typically shroud my camera under a towel and only uncover the lens and viewfinder when I am ready to shoot.   Despite the best efforts, snow can attach to the lens.  It is important to check regularly and have dry lens cloths available to clear the view.  I have had the experience of taking a long series of images, only to discover that my lens had become blotched somewhere in the middle of the shoot. 

Basic Settings
Shooting falling snow requires a number of decisions about how you want the flakes to be portrayed.  Subtle differences in shutter, aperture and focal length can make a striking difference in the appearance and mood of the image. 

Shutter
Simply stated, long exposures, usually less that 1/100, will show

Central Square Storm 2 Seconds

the snow as streaks, while a quick shutter will catch the snow as individual flakes.  As longer exposures are used there is a point where the individual flakes disappear and what is left is a soft fog which intensifies with greater distance from the lens.  I saw this nicely displayed in my 2-3 second
exposures of the Christmas lights on Keene's Central Square.  The snow was coming down heavily but no falling flakes could be seen.  Of course the correct shutter will depend on how quickly the flakes are falling. often subtle differences in shutter can make a significant difference in the mood of the image.  Check out the tractor and barn comparison below.   Experimentation is always necessary. 

In the Storm, 1/90th

In the Storm, 1/250th

F13, 1/90th

Aperture
A small aperture, with a large depth of field, will include a greater depth of sharp flakes, which will tend to make the storm appear more intense.  A wide aperture will focus attention on a smaller, more intimate selection of flakes and the shallow depth of field can allow the snow to stand out better against the background's soft Bokeh. 

 

f20, 1/100th

1/250, 340mm

Focal Length
The foreshortening effects of telephoto lens' tend to compress deeper selections of snow again giving a more intense feel.  Wide angle lens' give a broader sense of the surrounding but may need heavier snow to capture the full power of the storm. 

 

Enhance Storm Intensity:Long Shutter, Small Aperture & Long Lens
1/6 th, f 16, 105mm

Crank the ISO
Of course in tough weather conditions compromises need to be made. As always, the appropriate setting for each of these parameters is affected by the others.  In the dark of a storm there may not be enough light to combine a fast shutter with a small aperture.  Fortunately we now have the option to crank up the ISO.  Higher  ISO levels invariably result in more noise, but the good news is that there may be very few situations in which high ISO noise is less noticeable than in a blizzard.


Flash
Snow flake will stand out better, especially at night, if they are

Stone Bridge, Flash with Blotches

illuminated by a focused light source, such as a street light or car headlights, but here is probably no better way to stop falling snow dead in its track than to use flash.  Regardless of the  shutter speed the short duration of an electronic flash will freeze any nearby motion.  This effect will dissipate by the inverse square law as distance from the flash increases.  The problem with flash is that it most prominently lights the nearest flake, which are inevitably large and distracting.  With removal of the grotesque blotches (see below) the remaining flakes are more naturally highlighted  The combination of flash and natural light leads to a complex mixture of exposure and color temperature.  Again experimentation is in order.

Large Blotches Removed (See Below)

Ok, that is some of the basics.  Now let me finish with one of my pet peeves about falling snow images.  The Blotch.

 

Curing the Blotches

Blotched Storm

 
 For me "blotches" are the bane of my falling snow images.  You have undoubtedly seen beautiful atmospheric images of snow storms, but here and there are big blotches of white that seem out of place.  These white smudges come from the snow flakes that are close to the lens when the image is captured.  They are invariably out of focus and to me at least, extremely annoying.  Happily there are. number of ways to eliminate the blotch. 

Shade the Lens
 The simplest solution is to shade the lens from nearby flakes.  In the tractor by the barn comparison,  I shot from under a porch roof at Roads End Farm.  Magically, no blotches.  When a roof is not at hand an umbrella or a piece of card board can also help.  Just keep your shade out of the frame.

Central Square, 1/50th

Slow Shutter
The blotches are generally most noticeable at faster shutter speeds. With longer exposures the flakes are streaked and the smudged nearby flakes become less defined. Again the appropriate shutter will be dictated by the speed of snow fall and the size of the flakes.



 

Cloning and  Healing Brush
You knew we would have to get to Photoshop eventually.  Given the random complexity of the snow images, it is comparatively easy to use Cloning or the Healing Brush to replace the blotches.  In newer versions of Photoshop, the Content Aware Fill tool can also correct the scars. The automatic techniques, such as the Healing Brush usually do an amazing job, but occasionally I will use cloning to find a good source that matches the original background.

 
Multiple Image Layers 
My favorite approach to the blotch is to use multiple images.  Since the location of the blotches vary from image to image, I can use one image to patch another.  I pick the best of a series of images and then add the second best in a layer above the first.  After aligning the two images, I mask out the top layer.  I then scan the image and wherever a blotch appears I simply paint with white on the upper layer mask.  This nearly always brings up a section without the blotch. To me this is the most elegant solution, since the uncovered background tends to match that of the lower image. The blotches on the Stone Bridge above were cleaned with this technique.

The great thing about falling snow is that it provides a treasure chest of creative opportunities all within the easy reach to your camera's basic settings.  Now if we can get some snow out of this miserably cold weather, we will be set to go.  Get out there and experiment.

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Photoshop's Many Disappearing Acts

Finding the Best Way to Skin the Cat : Is there a Bad Way?

Photoshop usually provides more than one way to solve a problem. The fun is to find the easiest and most effective technique, but the newest and flashiest approach is not always the best.

My photography lives and dies with Photoshop. All my pictures pass through the program as they progresses from a flat RAW image to a picture which reflects the brilliance and drama of the scene. Photoshop is a miraculous program and every few years, when the next version arrives, it gets even better . Whenever a new version is announced the debate begins about whether the improvements are worth the expense of the upgrade, but, given the hours that I spend using the program, it always make sense to use the latest version.

What's in an Upgrade?
Over the years, most upgrades have touted a number flashy new features. Not surprisingly, Adobe aggressively markets the flash, anything that looks cool in a two minutes on-line tutorial. In recent years new features have included HDR, Content Aware Fill, Content Aware Move and Puppet Warp. These are all neat tools but have limited usefulness and they never seem to work as well as they appear in the tutorials. For me the real improvements are often much more subtle, and with greater impact on my day to day work flow. Important, recently added, enhancements have included significant improvements to the selection tools, vibrancy control, Shadow and Highlight controls, the magic Auto-Align and Auto-blend tools, and improved cloning tools. These and other practical improvement have made my photo editing much easier, quicker and more precise.

Don't get me wrong, I am an avid geek and I am always looking for excuses to play with the flashy stuff. I occasionally use Content Aware Fill, to help in the process of cleaning up my images, but it is seldom that I a find situation that calls for some of the other more specialized tools. One of the great things about Photoshop is that there is generally more than one way to solve any particular problem. The trick is to find the one that is the simplest and most effective. Sadly, simplest and most effective are seldom the same approach.

An Unnecessary Example (Moving the Branch)
Recently I caught an image of my village of Spofford, New

Snowy Village and Branch

Hampshire shrouded in fresh white just after a storm. This has become one of my favorite locations, not the least because I can literally see it from my home office window. It is easy to catch the scene in all sorts of light. The view only works when the leaves are down, but I enjoy the effect of seeing the village through a screen of bare trees. It adds to the soft and dreamy feel of the images, but I have always struggle with the one large branch that slashes across the church steeple. Because of an intruding house to the left of my position there is no way to "move" the branch by changing my location. I now feel that the branch does not substantially detract from the stately presence of the church, and adds a natural sense of a village nestled in the woods, but I keep wondering how it would look with the distraction removed. Even more significantly I was intrigued with the challenge of finding the best way to remove this prominent and intertwined feature. I have grown to like the branch right where it is, but I still decided to experiment with different techniques to remove it, including pulling out some of the “flash” of Photoshop CS6.

Skinning the Cat

Cloning 
My first approach was to try simple cloning, trying to pull 

Steeple Cloning

detail  from the surroundings to over-paint the branch. What makes the branch so challenging is that it is quite large and obscures a significant portion of the steeple structure. Cloning is relatively simple where the obstruction lies against a largely random pattern, such as the trees, but it becomes much more difficult against the rigid architectural background. Cloning can be a finicky and time-consuming task. Pieces of uncontaminated background need to found to copy over the problem areas. The final result is the complete removal of the branch. With care, patience and time, cloning can do an effective job. It took about 30 minutes to get a clean repair of this complicated image.  Much of the time was spent finding material to clone over the steeple structure.  It would be nice to find a way to simplify that portion of the repair.
 

Branch Cloned

Patch a Clean Steeple

Move to the left

For a second approach, I decided move to the left just far enough to move the branch off the steeple. The house gets in the way of a good, full image, but I selected and pasted the steeple as a separate layer to the original image and then moved it to overlie the difficult to clone structure. The rest of the branch still needed to be cloned but, again this was not a great challenge. Both of these first two approaches remove the branch entirely from the scene, but there is a way to rotate it out of the way while keeping it as a element framing the steeple. Enter the flash.

Steeple Patched

Steeple Patch

Puppet Warping
My final technique used one of the flashiest of the new features 

Web Around Branch

found in the last couple of versions of Photoshop (CS5 & CS6), Puppet Warping.  Puppet Warp allows selected portions of an image to be rotated around defined pivot points. It is often used to adjust the position of a model's arm or leg, sometimes with a rather grotesque effect. This approach is not perfect and still requires some careful cloning, but, in this case, it had the advantage of moving the branch rather than eliminating it all together. I started by selecting most of the branch and then chose the Puppet Warp Tool from the Edit menu. The tool creates a mesh over the selection that works as a framework that can be rotated around pivot points

Branched Moved

placed anywhere in the mesh. In this situation, I placed a pivot point where the branch met the tree and was then able to rotate the branch away from the steeple placing it in a location that nicely framed the spire. The hole left in the image was filled by a combination of Content Aware Fill and cloning, although using the steeple patch from the previous method would have been easier.  This is not the easiest approach but it saved the branch from extinction and, for a tree hugger like me, that is always a big advantage.

Context Aware Fill

Cleaned up with Cloning

This was all great fun, but after it all, I still think I like the picture with the branch untouched. I did this manipulation on a different image than the one that I captured in the midst of a snow storm, but I think I will leave the original picture unchanged. I apologize for rushing through these techniques. There are great tutorials all over the internet that discuss them in exhaustive detail. The point here was to show that Photoshop provides different way to reach the same goal. It is part of the power and fun of this remarkably pliable program. 

Branched Moved





Nice Puppet Warp Tutorial

Jeff Newcomer

partridgebrookreflections.com

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Photographic Composition, Avoiding Distractions

This weeks article may be a bit short. Susan had bilateral knee

White Hillside, Pomfret, Vermont

replacement a little over a week ago and I have been spending most of my time playing the role of supportive husband and therapist. She is doing remarkably well, but two replacements at the same time requires a lot of recovery and assistance Our wonderful daughter Abigail came up, from Washington to help out, allowing me to go to work for a couple of days, but now I am back on full duty. I won't be getting out of the house much in the next several weeks. All of this to explain why this week's blog is uncharacteristically brief and to the point. 

Hillside Distractions

Last week I discussed a few compositional techniques to help draw the eye to the key elements(s) of your photographs. Strong compositions typically provide a comfortable visual path to the subject. It is an essential part of an image's ability to tell a coherent story and story telling is what photography, at it's best, should be about.



 




Drawing the eye is effective, but avoiding distraction from the main

Damn Wires, Harrisville, NH

subject can be equally important. As I try to arrange a composition, I also watch for elements in the image that might distract from the central theme. Areas of bright light or color, competing lines or incongruous stuff poking in along the edges can disrupt the balance and flow of the image. 

Worth the effort

In the Camera
Avoiding distractions starts in the camera. As I approach the critical moment of shutter release I always try to pause for a quick scan of the composition for competing elements. The problems may be obvious, but often it takes discipline to shift the eye from the magnetic attraction of the subject to the surroundings. I first check the background and foreground for distractions. With portraits, it is usually the tree growing out of someone 's head, but phone wires, signs, or splashes of spectral light are just a few of the common problems. My final step is to scan the edges of the image for intrusions. Often subtle changes in framing can illuminate most problems, but sometimes the best composition unavoidably includes distractions. Thank goodness for the cloning tool.  But before you become outraged about post-processing solutions, please indulge
 my standard sermon.

Greening, Spring Hillside, Dummerston, Vt

Just a simple post

The Sermon, When in Doubt, Run to Ansel
There are those who will cheer efforts to frame images in the camera to eliminate distractions, but will protest their removal in post-processing as a dishonest manipulation of the reality of the scene. To me these questions of photographic purity are always a matter of individual artistic expression. My view is that photography is much more than a slavish regurgitation of the data recorded by the sensor. At its best a photographic image has the capacity to preserve not only what the eye sees, but also what the brain perceives and our memory retains. When I behold a beautiful landscape, I see the beauty and not the scars and it is that untarnished beauty that lasts in my memory. At home, when I see the RAW images, I am often surprised by what I didn't "see" while on site. I don't remember those cigarette packages on the ground or those hideous telephone wires and I don't feel any responsibility to preserve them to prove that I am a photographic purist. Angel Adams was once criticized for touching up a negative to remove graffiti that had been painted on rocks in one of his timeless images of Mt Whitney and the Alabama Hills. In response he said, " I have been criticized by some for doing this, but am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy – for me at least – the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene" (from  The 40 Images). But I digress, as usual.






But Become Clear Once Removed
Pomfret Vermont

Often the Distractions are Small ....
























Thank God and Ansel for the Cloning Tool
The first step in post-processing is to identify the issues. Cropping 

Die Annoying Bipeds!

and cloning can illuminate many distractions and sometimes the problems can be minimized by reduction in brightness or saturation, or by softening with the use of localized blurring. The art is in choosing the right tool and making the changes subtle. Cloning technique could be the topic of a number of articles by itself, but the secret is to vary the cloning sources and brush hardness to avoid excessively soft regions or obvious repeating patterns, and blending cloned areas with the background. It is always best to make these changes on a blank layer or a copy to avoid irreversible damage to the parent image.



Peggy's Cove Light, Nova Scotia

 One quick tip is to do the cloning early in your processing and especially before the image is re-sized. You don't want to be forced to re-clone every time a different size is required. Proper cloning can be a painstaking and time consuming job, but the results are usual well worth the effort. Besides, there is a perverse God-like pleasure in erasing those annoying humans from your beautiful image. 









 

Distracting White Label

Dummerston Vt, Hot House Flower

I promised this would be quick. Beyond the preaching, my point is really quite simple. Deciding on the path through your image you want your viewers to follow , arranging the elements to draw the eye along that path, and avoiding intrusions that may distract from the journey, are essential steps to a strong composition which tells your story.

Now back to the gimp.

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