This bridge is in a park nearby. The reflections I showed you some days back. During yesterday’s grey weather with slight snowfall I needed a break, so I grabbed my camera with two primes (42 mme and 127 mme) and walked round the pond to the bridge. All postprocessing was done with the new bibble5. The more I use this just released stable version, the more convinced I am. For my quite straightforward style and sober, more reduced colors it is an excellent tool, zeroing the need for further processing in a full scale photo editor.
Markus, I very much like these shots with the natural soft lighting, interesting snow patterns and subdued colors. They strongly convey the mood of the scene making it easy to almost feel like one is there.
“Sober, more reduced colors”. I love that phrase, especially the use of the word “sober”. It implies that oversaturation is akin to “drunkeness”. Interesting. Mark Hobson (The Landscapist) would love that.
My favorite image here is the first one. In my opinion, it has the best visual balance and the DOF is perfect (the bridge is out of focus, but clearly still a bridge). More importantly (to me), the green on the bench is strong enough to counter the overwhelming “greyness” of the scene.
Earl, Paul: Thank you for your positive remarks. It seems that this sequence can transport what I wanted to express. The colors where as subdued, fine nuanced as I rendered them – the light snowfall dampening the palette very much. Interesting enought the green of the bench in the first image was the only color that I had decided to emphasize by masking and selectively increasing saturation only for blue and green – the new bibble5 tools are very suitable for this kind of work.
The plane of focus was a difficulty in the first image: shot at f1.6 it turned out that at middle distances the camera’s AF was severely backfocusing (and my eyes not really good enough to focus manually with this microlens-groundglass). I had noticed this already a week ago and therefore started to recalibrate the AF manually (by fine-tuning three micro-screws under the bottom of the camera, as it does not have a software adjustment available). But using this wide open f-stop was indispensable for the aspired effect. I had tried the same scenery before stopped down, but then the background became too obtrusive.
Such lovely winter scenes. If I had a place that beautiful I think I could brave the cold.
Yes, those photos definitely carry the mood of such a winter day. My favorit is also No. 1, because of the nice interplay between the bench and the bridge in the background.