Duck Brook Cyanopowder 74 seconds at f/11 iso 100 24mm Ts-e with a little diagonal tilt for the heck of it.

Oy! Hello my stable-mates (not inferring that anyone of us is even tempered, just a greeting to my upright walking animal friends.) So I've been working on this image on and off since it was made back on the 31'st of December of last year. We had just had our sweet big powder snow fall of the winter of about a foot or so with lots of fluffy blowing drifts and I figured to revisit the 'Duck Brook Bridge in the Snow' shot that I haven't made now for a few years. The fun part of this trip is always the glissade down the hill to the streams edge in the snow. When the powder is deep enough, like it was that day, it's just a few big but slides down the hill- the trick is to not ruin the snow in your shot or go too fast and end up in the water. Here's the thing: I've had the hardest time with this picture since I made it, I just couldn't find the soul in it in post, I could never find the direction to go with completing it. But I still thought it could be a beautiful image even with the clear blue sky that it was that day. The thing is about our winters here is that it gets so cold and so high pressure system after another that more often than not it's a bitter chilly day with bald blue skies. Which isn't usually what gets me motivated to go picture making. But I had this shot here that had beautiful powder and really such a crisp and clean feel of the winter in Acadia and Maine and when I put it through my usual black and white rendition paces I wasn't feeling it- something was always missing from the emotional side of it. So I went at it again today and this time I again approached it with my usual B+W developing order to bring out the shadows and attenuate the highlights and sharpen and d+B etc etc, then it hit me like a ton of elephant's in the rooms to pop it back to blue and just like that, it was done. So that's dumb- because really it looks just a little different from the capture in the first place. There's a lesson in this somewhere maybe? Something about "don't let your process blind you to seeing"- case in point: I used to be an HDR addict! I've been off the HDR now for almost three years. I should get a nice 77mm commemorative lens cap for that or something. You all have your own vices when it comes to your process- fess up: what are your crutches? Hmmm>?

And as usual, have a nice day. -Nate!

oh and here's the original raw file.