429 - The End Of An Interlude



Yesterday was the end of a series of sunny days in Carinthia, and for me it was a one-day interlude. In the evening we were invited to a Christmas party near Klagenfurt, but upon arriving there, we decided to turn around and drive home again. It had begun to snow a little, and as we live on a hill, I was afraid that we would have problems getting up there.

And so it was. We took an alternative way that is not so steep, but even then I just managed to get the car and us safely home. Half an hour more and it would have been too late.

Today it was all white and gloomy. I worked on yesterday’s images and stayed at home. Shortly after sundown I finally went into the garden to shoot this image. It is the JPEG right out of the camera. Nikon 18-200 at 18mm, f11, ISO 200 and 30s, taken with mirror lockup and VR de-activated for maximum sharpness.

The Song of the Day is Bob Dylan’s “Winterlude” from the 1970 album “New Morning”. Boy, do I love it when he sings 🙂


There are 2 comments

Ted Byrne   (2007-12-21)

You got the gloomy thing. I wonder what would happen if you light balanced this for the blue? It's intriguing to me that your weather is so similar to our remembering of years spent in New England. Somehow I'd expected that Austria was more similar to Lancaster. On the other hand you live with mountains where we live among gently rolling hills. Perhaps the elevation accounts for a lot of the difference... and the distance from the sea?

💬 Reply 💬

andreas   (2007-12-21)

You mean setting white balance so that the snow is white/gray? I tried it, got 21000K and it looked completely uninteresting, just like on an afternoon with particularly bad weather 🙂

No, actually the look comes from two things.

First: I shot sometime in civil twilight at a cloudy day. That's the gloom.

Second: I deliberately let the white balance drift off to the cool side. I think yellow/blue is always a good thing, even if it is so asymmetric as here.

What certainly makes a difference, is the fact that we are surrounded by mountains, which in winter makes for long periods of fog and for static pools of cold air. Do you have fog in winter?

💬 Reply 💬