Snowshine
Snow blanketed the valley hanging on every limb of every tree. For 2 minutes the sun popped through the overcast skies and the world lit up....
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Snow blanketed the valley hanging on every limb of every tree. For 2 minutes the sun popped through the overcast skies and the world lit up.
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Mar, 2019Views
2369
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Awards
Action Award
Spring 21 Award
Contest Finalist in Drone Lovers Photo Contest
Contest Finalist in Covers Photo Contest Volume5
Celebrity Award
Contest Finalist in Covers Photo Contest Volume2
Contest Finalist in We Love The Winter Photo Contest
Peer Award
Absolute Masterpiece
Superb Composition
Magnificent Capture
Outstanding Creativity
Top Choice
All Star
Virtuoso
Superior Skill
Top Ranks
Top 10 rankTop 10 rank week 1
Top 10 rankTop 10 rank week 2Top 10 rank week 1
Categories
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mttomimages
June 05, 2019
Wow! Stunning image! I bet you were thrilled beyond words to get this shot! I voted for it. I hope you win the Covers contest!
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Behind The Lens
Location
It's not often you can say that this was taking 2/10ths of a mile from my house as the crow flies, but that's precisely where my drone was at the time .2 miles out and about 125 feet up.Time
This shot was taken at 7:21am the morning after a deep, wet snow here in New Jersey. Early enough that winds had not yet started to pick up and blow the collected snow off of the tree limbs. I had a lot of snow to clear but I decided to clear just enough to get the drone out first in case the winds picked up, which they indeed did about 45 minutes later.Lighting
The lighting in this shot is everything, and it wasn't there for me 4 minutes prior to this. The conditions were perfect for shooting this kind of snow, but for the first 15 minutes after putting the drone up I had nothing but overcast skies, so while the photos were nice there was no real "pop" to the images. My hands were getting cold so I decided to bring the drone in and get on with clearing the snow. It was just about to land when everything lit up. I immediately aborted the landing and put it back up hoping I had enough battery left to catch something. I headed straight for the sunrise and within a minute I saw this part of the neighborhood with every tree glowing and the corner house almost perfectly positioned. I adjusted the altitude and position of the drone so that I had the symmetry of the streets and fired off 3 shots before the sun ducked behind the clouds again and the "magic" went away.Equipment
This was shot with my Autel Evo drone. It has a built in 12MP camera with Raw image capabilities. That's all I used. No filters or add-ons. I believe it was shot at a -1EV in order to try not to blow out the sky. Had I to do it over again I'd have liked to shot at -2EV but it happened so fast that I'm happy with what I got.Inspiration
Every drone photographer has seen the photos of trees weighed down with snow still stuck to the branches shot from above, so that's what I'd set out to shoot that morning. I live in a bit of a valley and I'd purchased the drone to try and capture some of the beauty of it as snows and fog regularly blanket it, and I've come to love the fact that even though a large rural neighborhood covers some of it that same neighborhood captured from above can be quite beautiful as a subject in the right circumstances. This happened to be just one of those. I set out to shoot one thing and found something else. You have to love when serendipity takes you for a ride.Editing
Lots of post-processing on this one mainly because a shot like this, with a light source like the sun contained within, is going to cover a huge dynamic range and I did not have the time to do any HDR work here. The dynamic range capabilities of the Evo's camera is very impressive, so while the jpeg preview of the image was mostly dark except for the break in the clouds and the tree tops I was able to pull a lot of light out of the image. I first used the Basic and Tone Curve sections of the Lightroom Develop module (ie. Abobe Camera Raw) to pull out the details from the shadowed areas while protecting highlights as best I could. From there, as is normal, I pulled the image into Photoshop where I used Nik Color Efex Pro to do some detail extraction as well as play with some of the lighting (I'm pretty sure I used the Sunlight filter as well). I then invoked the Camera Raw filter to do some again play with the Tone Curve section, do some color balancing, clarity adjustments and sharpening. Finally in Photoshop I added a blur layer over the sky to reduce some of the over-structuring that came with the clarity adjustment in the previous step.In my camera bag
For drone photography it's easy - in the bag I have an Autel Evo, controller, and 3 spare batteries. I almost always use the Autel Explorer app on my iPhone 7s to have better control over the various parameters on the drone, but this day I am fairly sure I flew without it to save me some time in getting going. I love that you don't need to use a device to have "first-person view" since the controller has a built in 720p screen that works great if you don't need some of the fancier features built into the app.Feedback
The best advice I can give around this shot is don't ever give in to time or weather. When I got up and saw what it looked like outside the photographer in me was so excited that I'd finally been blessed with one of those mornings you "see in pictures", and the guy who doesn't do this for a living in me saw 10 inches of snow that wasn't going to clear itself before my first conference call of the day. The employed person needs to win out once in a while, but whenever you can push past them you should, because you can't ever fall in love with any of the photos you don't take. The other important thing here is to never be afraid to change the plan, even at the last second. What I wanted to shoot on this day got shot, but you're not seeing any of them because the light just wasn't right. But just as I was about to call it a morning the sun came out even as I was landing. I knew that I didn't have the battery for the shot I wanted, but I had enough battery to check and see if there was anything close by to shoot, so up I went again, even with numb fingers. Some photos will simply just find you, but you have to be looking and you have to be ready for them. Such was the case here.
