Photographs by Frank

8 January 2018

What Is White?

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: , — Frank @ 7:00 PM

A few days ago (before the “big storm”) Joan and I made a snowshoe trek on Gregg Lake. I noticed all sorts of interesting wind-made patterns in the snow on the lake. I had not taken my camera with me on this day and the sky was overcast. Thus the light was flat and boring.

Yesterday, noting that the wind had cleared most of the fifteen inches of snow that had come down in the “big storm” from the ice and that the light was “nice” (there were high, thin clouds but the light was still fairly hard), I had the notion to head out on the lake again with my camera.

I waited until mid-afternoon, when the sun would be low but not so low that the lake surface would be in shadow,  strapped on my snowshoes and headed down to the lake. The temperature was about 10 degrees F. It was about 3:15 when I arrived at the lake and already about a third of the surface was in shadow. I spent the next three-quarters of an hour chasing the edge of remaining sunlight across the lake and making photographs all the way.

The title of this post refers to the notion that, although all of the snow I saw was ostensibly white, in reality white is merely an illusion.

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2 Comments

  1. Like the patterns, Frank. But why are they so grey looking???

    Comment by Joe Kennedy — 8 January 2018 @ 8:29 PM

  2. Warning… photographer talk ahead!

    Well, they are grey because of my processing.

    As you know, one can place snow anywhere on the histogram by altering the exposure. In this case, I overexposed (by about a stop) to get the “best” data.

    However, the contrast was pretty flat, the total exposure covering only about a third of the histogram. Thus when I processed these photos I stretched the data to cover the entire histogram (by setting the white and black points) and then I played with the contrast.

    The result is nothing like “reality”, but they are abstracts they don;t have to hew to reality.

    Comment by Frank — 22 January 2018 @ 5:06 PM

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