This is shot was taken a bit further on from the last shot. The mist has come back in. I am further away from the sunshine in the woods.

My Canon 6D is fantastic at working in low light, and also for pulling out all the details in a picture.

And this image is no exception.

The intention with this image was to lead the eye into the picture and down the path, off into the mist. That was what I wanted to capture. That was the story of the scene.

Even though the photograph was taken in the winter, there is still lots of natural colour in the scene.

The trees are covered with this wonderful vibrant green, and the leaves on the ground are still showing the browns and oranges.

The mist in the atmosphere has added atmosphere to the scene, which helps draw out the natural colours especially in the leaves on the ground.

And the other part of the story of this picture is the path leading off in the misty distance.

This image reproduces  what I saw.

And when I look at one of my pictures and what I look at on my screen is what I remember seeing when I was there I am happy that I have done a good job.

This picture has bags of mood and depth.

So what did I do to produce this image?

Some of the key elements of my image capture and processing were these

Image capture

• Mounting my Canon 6D on my Manfrotto 190 Go tripod
• Back button focus – I focussed a third of the way into the image then re-composed for the shot.
• Composition – I used a focal length of 105mm on my Canon 24-105mm lens to get the telephoto effect, bringing the distant path closer and excluding things I did not need need in the image. And also compressing the scene.
• Set my aperture to F8 for the sharpest capture
• HDR bracketing – 3 shots merged together in Lightroom

And for the processing of this image in Adobe Lightrooom

• Auto-white balance – manually corrected
• Camera calibration using the Landscape Profile
• Initial processing is done on import into Lightroom using one of my Develop presets
• Further subtle editing using the Basic Panel
• Further tweaks in the HSL Panel to adjust the saturation and luminosity of some of the colours in the image
• Finally, to finish off, dodging and burning
• Oh yes. And a vignette to polish things off.

And that is the colour image produced.

The only question outstanding regarding this image is – will the black and white version of this picture be better than the colour one?

There’s only one way to find out – call back to my blog tomorrow to find out

Rick McEvoy Photography

Tuesday 14th February 2017