What did I do to make this appealing image happen?!?
The answer is - well, embarrassing.
First off, here's the shot.
- Gear - Lumix G85 and 12-60mm² lens.
- Processing - resized, cropped to remove the right side which was all wall. That's it.
- Technique - none. I suppose that could be expanded upon a bit.
After a couple of cold and stormy days I awoke to a clear and cold dawn. I wasn't dressed to go take photos, and our deck had about a foot of snow on it. Since it was so pretty out I went with the alternate plan: stick my arm out the sliding door and shoot.Here was the result. Neat light on the clouds, plenty of snow, and I managed to stay warm as I sipped my coco-mocha.
About fifteen minutes later the sun broke through those low clouds and illuminated the yard and deck with warm-tinted sunshine. The texture of the snow in our yard looked really cool and I needed to take a second photo. Having looked at the first shot I knew it was too wide, so I zoomed in a bit while standing in the warm house. So the composition step was taken in absentia and was quite arbitrary, with the goal of more yard, less house.
The G85 allows one to pop the screen halfway out for shooting at odd angles, e.g. one-handed out a sliding door. I didn't do that. Instead I held the camera out again at arm's length, eyeballed it as level, and clicked. It could possibly have been a bit better with some actual time spent with composition but with my arm extended the image was really too far away for me to work hard at improving the composition.
It was much later in the day that I looked this shot over, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had caught the sun in the image. Note that it sits between the downspout and the wall of our home - meaning that any earlier or later (or if my arm were longer or shorter!) this would be a completely different image. So a bit of planning might have helped, but probably would have led to a poorer overall result; thankfully, I did none.
When I saw the 'post your snow images' thread at an online forum I imported the image into LView Pro v1.D2, my mid-90s imaging software that is tiny and excellent at simple editing. I cropped out most of the outside wall, resized and re-saved.
Yes, some day I can grab the original and do some 'serious' editing of this image. I may even want to do that. Maybe.
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I like stories with morals so here goes:
Good gear is good, and gear that suits you is better than gear that doesn't.
Gear that you know will serve you better than gear you don't know.*
Light/location/timing are more important than gear!
Go take pictures, and be amazed.
*The G85 is not gear that I know just yet. It's impressed me consistently despite my ignorance.
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