I took this the other morning at Utah lake. Utah lake is very large and shallow so it quickly forms ice, we then get these big windstorms that break the ice up and blow it all up against the shore. By the end of winter there are sometimes stack of ice 10-15 feet tall along the shoreline. I am fortunate enough to live about 2 miles down the road from this spot, so I can watch the morning light and when it looks like it will be a good sunrise I can get down to the lake in under 5 minutes.
Post processing was limited to some curve adjustments, I actually toned down the saturation just a bit as it felt overly saturated after doing the curves.
Very, very nice. Love the detail of the broken ice, but I'm thinking it could even use a bit more sharpening. That would give you two options for this picture, the "global" scene, and the sharper ice where the ice is the focal point. Either way, it's a beauty.
Yeah it could some sharpening. How do you guys deal with that, If you sharpen the full rez version and then do a scale down for web, do you also apply additional sharpening to the scaled down version? I scaled it using bicupic sharper, but perhaps it needs a bit more.
Andy, you always sharpen the final res image, as the settings are different for print and for web sharpening. Ian Plant has a great instructional video on processing for the web.
This is a great shot. There are a lot of elements I really like. The colors are great and I particularly find the warm tones reflecting off the jagged ice to be very compelling.
In addition to cropping a bit of the sky (maybe 1/3rd or so) I would also play with cropping a good 1/4-1/3 of the left side. To my eye the right portion of the image is where the action is at, so to speak.
That's a thought too, I might be running out of resolution though, still shooting with a 30D. Eek. I guess it's not a problem if I don't want to print it.
Really cool scene! I'd consider making a square crop of the right side of this image. That's the business end of this image, and I think a square would make for a great composition. I'd also kick the saturation back up a bit to where it was initially, and perhaps darken your dark tones a bit. This would allow for a richer, more natural range of tones for that wild light!
I love the broken glass effect of the ice in this image. Ben's suggestion for a square crop sounds pretty good and would concentrate the comp on the heavy color portion of the capture. Nice you are close enough for return visits. I lived in SLC for 24 years and had no idea this scene existed down there.
Thanks for the comments everyone. I will revisit this and play around with the cropping a bit, I definitely think I will raise the horizon and chop some of the left side.
I considered photoshoping out the lights in the distance...... but can't decide if that is overdoing it or not.
