greg mccracken

Dana and Larry. Thanks for taking the time to comment! Dana, I will remove the power lines when I get a chance. It's tricky once they get into the tree branches. I did wade downstream further in an effort to avoid them, but there were no interesting ice features there. Larry, I think your color balance adjustment looks fine. I would choose one or the other options to print, depending on the decor colors of the room I was going to hang it in.

Thanks Len! I'm looking for a chance to get up your way for a shoot. I'll see what I can do in the near future...before it gets too warm for you and I to do our deep freeze shoot thing like we did a few years/cameras ago! I'll let you know when I do.

J and Len, thanks for commenting; another pair of eyes is always very helpful! Here's my crop based on your suggestions.

Thanks Jeff! The colours are as they appeared on my viewfinder after the shot. I do have saturation and contrast turned up a bit in my camera settings, as per my taste. The source of the light was from the town of Fergus, hence the yellow cast. There was no natural light from the sky when I shot this. Thanks for commenting!

That's a good point, Jeff. The aperture was at f16 and my focus dial is set at .5 m, so maybe focusing closer next time will be the answer.

Thank you Linda and Bryce! Linda, keep looking at photos you like and figuring out how the photographer made them. In this one, I waded into the stream and put my camera lens as close to the foreground ice as possible on the tripod then waited until the sunlight was as pretty as it was going to get, which was in this case about 45 minutes, then took the picture. I used a wide angle, 17mm lens to get the whole scene in view and used an aperture setting of f22 to enable me to get the whole scene in focus. I set my focus to a position just short of the Infinity setting on my lens.Then on the computer, I lightened the shadows, darkened the highlights, increased the contrast, sharpened it and voila. Also getting educated suggestions from experienced photographers like Jeff Bryce, here, help you think about the decisions you made making a photograph differently, often with beneficial results.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jeff. Please see my cropped image below. I think it is an improvement! I used the Photographer's Ephemeris to determine in which line the sun will be shining at sunset this time of year, and that led me to this part of the Gorge as the line is straight up the gorge right now, allowing light down into it. As an aside, there weren't any options for positioning myself further downstream as there was too little ice and too much water.

This is what the gorge looked like a month ago. For this photo I was standing right where the water of the two streams converge.

Thanks for the tip and the compliments, Bela! Looks better!

This is the shot I had in mind before I went into the gorge. As I was shooting I noticed the sun spotlighting the giant icicle on the right hand side of the gorge, as you can see under the bridge in the distance. I tried to rush over to my kit bag to get my long lens to zoom in on the glowing icicle but wading in the deep fast flowing water was slow and when I got back in place in the stream, the light had moved off. I'll have to go back down another night at this time of year to get the shot as it promises to by dramatic! Maybe we have another Horsetail Falls (Yosemite) phenomenon here in Ontario. Got my feet wet by the way, as the water went over the tops of my boots.

We had clear skies tonight for sunset...too clear for any drama. I went down

into the Elora Gorge to look for some good scenes. I thought this would be a

unique view of Lover's Leap. Lover's Leap is above the cliff base that is seen

in the distance. It is a very high cliff and point where the two rivers join.

This is an excellent piece of work, Halina!

I just processed the file in Lightroom for colour noise reduction and luminance. Here's a crop of the resultant image.

Thanks Jeff,

I don't know which toy I am enjoying more these days, the hip waders or the camera. Thanks for the insight on the noise in the foreground. I overlooked that detail and will attempt to remove it in software. Although I nearly always tend to attempt to get the horizon sharp as well as the foreground, I recently watched an instructional video by world famous photographer Art Wolfe. He pointed out that in photos like this, a photographer should decide what the subject is and draw attention toward it, allowing non essential elements like the distant horizon to go out of focus or fall into shadow. Thanks for commenting!

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