A Balance of Colour

22January

A Balance of Colour

Back in December last year the weather was pretty cold. It seems to have dropped back to those levels over the last few days. We haven’t seen any snow within the county, but the frosty weather is an interesting addition to many of the images I have captured.

It was so cold we found ourselves with a hoar frost. The phenomena occur when water vapour freezes on solid objects. (Now that’s the simplest of explanations, there is probably much more science behind it than that.)

It’s a landscape photographer’s dream as it covers a scene in a white feathery coat. Unlike snowfall, frost is somewhat more susceptible to light and the sun. The density of snow soaks the colour and ambience of the light, where as the frost seemed to draw the light into it and the light is visible with the transparency of the frost

The Colour

I found myself challenged by the opposing colours and feelings of the images I was capturing. It was such a bitter morning, but as the sun rose above the trees, there was this brilliant warming light.

It’s so different to what we usually see within this context. The colours of the heath and woodland are so much more natural than what we see here. These hues and tones are usually seen on the coast at sunrise. So that challenge was something to explore during my visit and as I started to process the images.

Processing

It was hard to process the images after I had downloaded and prepared them. The real struggle was figuring out how to capture the feeling of the morning, the colour the of cold bitter frost and the warmth of the sun on the top of the trees and in the foreground of the images.

The challenge began with images that were polar opposites in colour. As they seem to be hard to figure out, a mixture of those two, made my job when finalising the images harder. so much so, I exported a few of these images more than once, due to having a chance to review them before I posted them. I felt with the some were pushed too hard in the processing or didn’t look correct upon further viewing.

The image below in particular was one I was most troubled by. The two colours were almost clashing when I first looked at it as an image. I was conflicted by the way there were some of the natural colours were included in the image too. It was really hard to balance the way to include the frost, the warm light and the natural colours. I feel I did it justice in the end.

The Balance

It’s all about balance, some images I left as I shot and just cleaned them up for final viewing. For others I took the warm tones out in post-production. I felt that they suited a more simple approach to remove that unnatural feeling that they could have.

Balancing the colours, feelings and compositions was the order of the whole process. It wasn’t easy to try and ensure the images didn’t look out of place as single images or as the set of images included here. It would have been easy to overdo the images and push them too hard.

These are the rest of the images that I captured during this one visit, it was a very fruitful morning.