large format (4x5) Untitled

MacGregor, This is a strong composition. The vertical lines of the trees certainly caught my eye. I'm a sucker for this type of shot. You managed terrific DOF in this!

I'm not sure about the blue color cast. I suspect that's the product of Velvia.

That color cast had me a little stumped. I corrected using the color sampler tool and levels on the individual RGB channels to get the snow white and the shadows black, but I think I needed to fiddle with the middle tones too. I'm pretty lame at photoshop still, since most of my focus this year has been in the traditional darkroom. Where I'm also pretty lame, but improving faster.

Glad you enjoyed the composition here. I thought the straight trunks at different angles made for an interesting pattern.

I'll do some research before making my next round of color shots. I don't have anything in the way of warming filters, nor am I really up on reciprocity (this was a pretty long exposure) for this stuff. I know some slide film shifts colors as well as needing more time, though I'd read somewhere that Velvia 100F needed no compensation for exposures up to a minute. My shots from this first batch, especially some that are heavy with shadows, look like they were shot through a blue filter, so I definitely have something to learn.

Before I started shooting digital, I shot Velvia (mostly 50 but also 100)almost exclusively. For your typical green meadow, pretty flowers, colorful sunset shots, I always enjoyed the color saturation. With snow, sand, etc. It's a different story. I made my corrections in PS using color balance. Sometimes, it would occur to me to use a warming filter. With these, I'm sure you want your transparency as perfect as it can get. It might be worthwhile to try a warming filter. Here's a quick PS adjustment.

Salvatore Mele has a good note about blue color cast and snow related to this image:

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2939019

I like the vertical lines of this composition. I'd initially thought that some of the patterns got broken down by some of the merges ... but coming back to the shot a couple of hours later, I'm not nearly as bothered by this, and think these are easily minimized by the effect of the inward leaning trees in the right and left foregrounds of the image, which make it a much more interesting composition.

Nice job with the exposure - forests are tough in my experience (i.e. my exposures are almost always off) - if you've seen the House of Flying Daggers, which is shot predominantly in forests, they did most of their shooting on cloudy days to solve the exposure challenges - either way, the movie is a cinematographic treat.

Best, Jeremy