Frost on the beach

A rare frosty day at the beach, and the frost crystals were refracting brilliant

colors when viewed at about a 30 degree angle to the sun. I had to open up

the lens and throw the crystals out of focus to make the colors show up,

and that made them seem to float. What do you think--did it work?

Hi Les....Seriously...this is brilliant. Firstly, i read the technical work you did to achieve and capture this image. and you captured it brilliantly. Its artistic and so very different from the norm. I dont see much of this too often. If it were up for ratings..10/10. Well done my friend. Regards, Lawrence.

A fun, FUN image. Creative without beating one over the head with itself.

This is Intelligent photography! Great shot. Congratulations!

Perfect execution and the result is like viewing a whole new universe... Mike

The Great Balloon Race over the desert :)

The photo offers many opportunities for a fertile imagination to indulge and shows great innovation from the photographer!

Best Regards

 

Alf

 

There is a horde of tiny colored spheres invading this beach.  The invasion appears to have succeeded.  OMG, what a catch!

Leslie, I have seen you making some quite detailed comments on images here at photo.net and I wanted to positively reciprocate but that is difficult with this image for which I only have praises. Those colorful spheres are really attractive and certainly make this image very appealing.

 

This is predicated on my personal tastes and it is not a recommendation - just food for thought. You also have to take into consideration that it is based on what I am seeing on an old computer monitor. My desire is to see the image a tad warmer even though it is frost which I have seen in a variety of ways here in Montreal.  I used Photoshop color balance clicking on the shadow button and added some yellow and red (orange). 

All the best,

 

for some odd reason, I think of colorful fish scales - perhaps one of the beauties in photography lies in prompting the viewer to allow interpretation to emerge - radiant, colorful, floating, spheres, suspended in time,  can translate into fish scales. :)

Leslie- well seen! Tony's rendition is also good.

As much as I appreciate the way you express yourself with words, your pictures are equally lucid and at times - such as here - simply magical. Ton'y version is also quite good, I think. This one goes into my favorites.

Thank you all so very much for your comments—they mean a lot to me! So first, a bit of the back-story: the things that didn’t work the first frosty morning (and there were an embarrassing number of things that didn’t work) gave me an idea for what might work, and this was frame #67 of the second morning—I spent about 20 exhilarating minutes chasing the frost up the beach, since each patch would melt within a few minutes of the sun hitting it. The dog thought I was crazy, but she’s getting used to it. 

 

Second, I got a question about how the illusion of floating comes about. That turns out to be collusion between the mechanics of the lens and the brain’s efforts to make sense of the world: because I focused on the foreground, the further away the frost crystals were, the more out-of-focus they were, and the more out of focus, the bigger the circles of confusion around what were effectively point sources of light. Now the brain steps in, making the assumption that all the circles are in reality the same size, so it’s “obvious” that the big circles are closer than the small circles—exactly the opposite of reality. That makes the circles that are firmly planted on the background slope appear to be hovering over the foreground. 

 

And third—Tony, thanks very, very much for your help with this image! I’d cooled the original image down to 4614K from a capture at 5250K to counteract the warmth of the sunrise light and make the frost seem as cold as it felt. Your edit brings it to about the equivalent of 4900K, but with one important difference that I think works brilliantly—by applying the warmth primarily to the shadows, the frost stays cold—that option had not occurred to me. I don’t have photoshop and I’m not yet up to speed with Affinity, so I experimented with reediting in Lightroom. I used split toning, upping the orange level in the shadows and upping the blue slightly in the highlights to try to preserve the frostiness. My impression is that the overall color in this version is nicer than my first try, and that the warmth in the shadows is actually making the ice seem even colder in contrast. Thanks for introducing me to an idea that I'm going to be able to apply a lot!

 

The other change I’ve made here is to sharpness—it had been bugging me that the orbs weren’t more sharply defined (um…what can I expect from forms that exist precisely because they’re out of focus?), but I couldn’t sharpen as much as I would have liked because that did unconscionable things to the sand. On this version I did go ahead and egregiously over-sharpen everything, then went in with an adjustment brush and unsharpened the sand back to where it had been. 

 

Verdict, anyone?

!!!!..!

Les,

Brilliant!!!

I just came across this, it's magical. I think you found a way to take perhaps a "regular" image and transform it to something, as I said magical. It's very beautiful.................Best Regards, holger

Stunning, quite frankly, I have tried to shoot the very similar scene (frost on the grass with colourful crystals) without much success. Choosing the wide open aperture and the out of focus technique to capture the colours was the act of genius. Great shot. I also wanted to thank you for your kind and detailed comments/critiques on the images here in PN. Respectfully, Mehrdad.

Drew, Kamala, Holger, and Mehrdad - I apologize for my delay in responding! Thanks so much for your feedback on the frost image—it’s one I had a lot of fun with, and I learned a lot in the process. And Mehrdad—I’m finding that the same approach is working for dewdrops and for bringing out the colors in sea foam; I’ll upload some of those soon. There's a lot to experiment with!