Goodbye dear winter, it’s been nice to know you.
I thoroughly enjoyed being stuck in traffic for hours because of the snow, fight a war against my tripod because the legs were frozen, watch my fingers do essentially nothing inspite of multiple brain signals fired in their direction, see ice cristals form on the LCD screen and see nothing at all through a constantly fogged up viewfinder. But I also loved to be the first to walk through pristine snow, choose between ripe covered trees to photograph and lure little birds to pose for me in the white-wonder-world. Now it’s all over.
We’re back in our typical Dutch winter weather. Dark gloomy skies, a moisture level that’s somewhere between wet and rainy and few interesting subjects to choose from. I tend to lose my inspiration in this kind of circumstances. Not this time however: why not use the conditions in my favour and focus (no pun intended) on forms and contrast?
A way to do so is convert a photograph to black and white and play with the (local) contrast levels a bit. In this image of a flock of Canadian Geese, I kept just a tiny hint of color and increased the contrast only in the birds. The result: a rather moody image that stresses the symmetry within the flock (wing position-wise, that is).
Canadian Geese; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS; 1/125s at F4 and ISO 400; Handheld
