Enjoying some fresh snow on the New Hampshire Seacoast.

This has been a great winter for cross-country skiing on New Hampshire's Seacoast - lots of snow and cold.  Wednesday, I went out to Odiorne State Park in Rye, NH for a morning ski.  I went with a pack full of camera gear, hoping to get a good shot or two, but mainly I'm working on getting my body in shape for a 3 night lodge-to-lodge ski and photo shoot in Northern Maine that I have scheduled for next weekend. 8 to 12 miles of skiing per day seems pretty reasonable until you add 40 pounds of camera and other gear to the mix.  I'll let you know in 10 days or so if I succeeded.  I took the above photo of myself using an intervalometer with my Canon 1Ds Mark III.


The skiing shot didn't need a lot of post-production work, but I do plenty of tweaking in Lightroom for most photo shoots.  One Lightroom feature that I love is the Graduated Filter local adjustment in the Develop module.  It simulates the use of a graduated, split neutral density filter, only you have much more control over the strength of the filter, the placement of the horizon, and the width of the gradations.  You can also rotate the filter in Lightroom, but I have always been disappointed in how hard it is to keep the horizon line straight when rotating it - the control is just too sensitive.  Recently, a workshop student of mine clued me in on a little trick with this filter.  Just hold down the shift key while dragging the filter, and the horizon line will stay straight, either horizontally or vertically.  This little trick has saved me a lot of frustration and helped me improved dozens of photos already in just a couple of months.  Try it out.

Until next time...
-Jerry

 

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