Frozen Twilight : Blue Hen Falls, Cuyahoga Valley National Park

Shooting just before nightfall completely enveloped the scene, I was

surprised how cold one could get. Your comments, critiques, and

ratings are invited. Thank you.

Great work this is a Wonderful Image.

Hi Walter exposure spot on. Good composition and very well framed good work.

Just beautiful.

Beautiful . The blue tone is excellent

Excellent as always! Congratulations. Ivana

beautiful detail in foreground and middleground. The bounding trees against the sky help to tone everything down and maintain the blue, wintery feel. The brownness of the water at the lower left hand and the black area there put me off looking at the LHS of the tree there - maybe I have lost some detail on my screen. You must have been freezing there. What a contrast to "Blue Hen Falls - summer"

Super image Walter. Composition is very well concieved with a nice lead-in at the bottom traveling through the main point of focus, the waterfall. You almost have a complete S pattern. The dark LL is a little distracting, but not bad. I hope you had your hat and gloves, it does look cold! Excellent image - Sean

Great handle on a tricky exposure once again Walt. Suprised you didn't slip on the ice getting this shot. The long exposure actually gives the flowing water an icey look. Well done.

Thanks guys, I appreciate the comments. The dark areas on the left, especially under the rock shelf, present a problem. Also, I do not like the way the grad darkened the top of the big tree on the left. Looking at the chrome there is still plenty of detail there and under the shelf but to bring it out without blowing the sky I would have to do a double scan and merge it. For this upload I am going to leave it as it is. If I print this, and I am not sure that I will, I will reconsider the scan job.

 

Let's see, what else. I sharpened this in two passes, both at 200%. The bottom half was sharpened at a radius of 0.6 and the top at half that at 0.3. I still see sharpening halos along the branches in the uppermost portion of the frame (tell-tale sign of a rank amateur!), so I would have to rethink my plans for USM.

 

I am most thankful for the ratings that I have recieved on this, but if I were rating it myself I would have given it a 5/5.

 

Will, I did slip...landed right on the ol' keester; should of been wearing my crampons for this one. Regards.

Walter, great job of controlling the light. It is evident that you have used a Neutral Density Filter. I love the long exposure, the blue light in shadow areas and great details, like always another winner, regards, Rajeev

Very nice composition Walter. I like it a lot. You presented the mood of that frosty day very well. The only thing I don't like is that previously mentioned strong transition line (on the tree) coming from the filter use. You could try to mask it a bit more. Anyway - great shot. Cheers, Piotr

Very nicely done, Walter, as always. Lighting is very nice. Now if you could just climb up that little tree on the right and remove that offending branch that makes a loop through the top of the image - well, I guess that would be a bit tricky.

 

Great photo,

 

Cheers

Wonderful image, just excellent!

Excelente trabako tecnico, luz, color y belleza, saludos cordiales Walter...Excellent technical trabako, light, color and beauty, cordial greetings Walter.

Outstanding image, love the colors of the water fall and the overall blue tone. It looks very cold especially if you stand there for very long.

Walter, I like the arrangement of all the elements here though I must say the bottom most foreground leaf is dangeroulsly close to the edge of the frame. The sharpness throughout is impressive & would probably be more apparent in a very large print. The overall blue balance leaves little doubt that it was indeed very cold there. As for the 'halos' around the small tree branches, you suggest there is a cure for this. Most of my offerings exhibit this fault so I thought it was normal. :-) Even the use of a grad filter left you with a scene with a high brightness range but the resulting photo is great. Wouldn't have worked without one. Since I don't own one for my SQ Ai I would have had to crop out most, or perhaps all, of the sky. Best, LM.

Yes, Len, the halos are the result of applying an inappropriate "quality" of sharpening to areas containing fine detail. It is not only the amount of sharpening but also the radius. What I did with this particular image was to open a duplicate layer and used USM to sharpen it, then I erased portions of the layer. For example, I sharpened the lower half with 0.6 radius. That was fine for the bottom area but the halos were really obvious up in the branches. So I just erased that part of the layer. Then I shapened a new layer at 0.3 radius. That seemed okay for the branches but I should have used 0.2 instead. Using this method you can selectively sharpen at different amounts and radii depending on image detail content.

 

Thank you Sondra for the visit and comment. Regards to all.

Excellent and beautiful composition. I like very much this blue cold tonality.

Great lines and depth of exposure, mmmmm nice!

Very difficult exposure Walter which you've managed to pull off somehow. Congrats.

Thak you Henri, Becky, and Mike! Much appreciated. Yes Mike, as you noted the exposure was tricky. This was the best out of six frames that I took, and I still had some adjusting to do on the scan. Looks like it is time for some warmer weather shots. Thank you all for stopping by. Regards.

Good, really good...

Walt, it has the look of a late winter shot, and I see that it was indeed shot very late in winter. This shot appeals to me not so much because of the inherent beauty of refrozen snow and muddy water, etc., but because I have seen this kind of scene so many times, from the Akron area where I spent some years growing up to the Carolina mountains, which can at altitude give weather worse than much of Ontario's.

 

--Lannie

Ahhh... the warmth of a winter scene :)

Walt, thiss is a great shot not only technically (composition & exposure), but also for the fact that it is a very evocative one. The serenity implied by the flowing sstream. The gentle glow of the setting sun, the cool blues inherent in such a winter scene all combine to make this a poignant capture, worthy of hanging on one's wall ;)

Best regards from Kenya,

Mark