White. Out.

This photo is the result of quite a bit of manipulation, as I endeavored to create a scene from my mind’s eye, out of the scene that I was standing in the raw, cold drizzle looking at.

I recently stood on the shore of Quarter Mile Pond, on the most uninviting of March mornings, peering through naked branches at nothing but grey.  I could have EV’d this up to brighten the snow and sky, but this is pretty much what it really looked like.

However, what I had in mind was an uninterrupted wash of white from the near icy pond to the distant shore and up into the sky.  More white than anything else, with no way to distinguish between any of the elements of the scene but the snow and the trees.  That’s what I wanted.  So I went to work.

First in Lightroom 4, I cropped the image and upped the exposure, getting that white out condition I had imagined, at which point I was looking at this…

Better, but all of those branches in the foreground and sky were a major distraction, and interrupted the “flow” I was trying to achieve.  So, I opened the image in Corel PSP X4 to clone out the mischievous twigs, then back to Lightroom for some finishing touches.  I played with a B&W conversion but there’s so little color in the scene to begin with, I left it as is, hoping that the viewer will catch a glimpse of that smidge of color while being drawn into the whiteout.

And that’s the finished product.  So what do you think – was it worth the effort?  Are you getting a chill?

By the way, this was taken with a Canon point and shoot that’s usually bouncing around in the bottom of my briefcase (I was on the way to work!).

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