More Winter Landscape Photography

Reflections from Below – Smithville, Texas
Copyright 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II set on manual (M) using an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens tripod-mounted. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/13 for 1/13th of a second at ISO 100 using a Singh-Ray LB warming polarizer. Post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta and Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro. Click on the image above for a larger version.

How to Get this Type of Shot: A landscape image of a perfectly calm lake and shoreline reflecting the late afternoon sky, converted to an “old fashioned” looking duo-tone.

• The key to this shot is the weather conditions. You’ll need to shoot on a day with almost no wind so the water is mirror like and perfectly reflects the sky. I waited several hours before the conditions for this shot were perfect.

• Again, a good sturdy tripod is a must in a situation like this, since any camera shake will ruin the effect. Another very important accessory is a bubble level. The human brain is very sensitive to horizontal lines and if your image is not perfectly level, people will notice. I used a bubble level for this shot but still had to do some final corrections in Lightroom.

• Correct exposure is critical in an image like this, especially since any digital noise found in your raw image will be magnified when converted to black & white. I bracketed several exposures of this scene before I got a good balance between bright whites and dark blacks. In B&W photography, contrast is King!

• The final key to this type of “Antique Plate” looking image is the black & white / duo-tone conversion. There are probably 20 different Photoshop and Lightroom techniques that could accomplish this but I’ve found Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro plug-in to work much better than I ever could in PS or LR.

Posted in Photography Tagged: Buescher State Park, Canon, Canon 5D Mark II, Landscape Photography, Photography, Texas Landscapes