Time Immortal

I’m getting much better, I think, at creating HDR shots that don’t have too much of an over-processed feel to them. This one, taken from a vantage point overlooking Wabumun Lake, Alberta, is demonstrative of that fact.

If you dislike spiders, stay away from the woods around Wabumun Lake, Alberta — it seems to be a particularly good year for them.

I took this picture from the bottom of a ravine near Wabumun Lake, Alberta. I was out at the Ernest Poole Scout Camp there, helping with some work on an eroding trail, and found the view to be to my liking.

This picture ranks, I think, as my current favourite Lensbaby picture, and for good reason. In addition to the fact that it’s an amazing winter scene, with a sunset filtering through the trees, the full effect of the star-shaped aperture plate is on display in all of the bordering blur. Everything in the shot seems to be hinting at its transformation into a star-shaped out-of-focus point.

The Den sits on a plateau overlooking Wabumun Lake, and so affords a commanding view of the sunset. Even through the trees, the sunsets look really good, probably because the forests in the area are primarily comprised of deciduous trees (i.e. trees that lose their leaves in the winter). The thinner trunks mean that even when one is several hundred metres from the edge of the plateau, and separated from it by a patch of forest, one can still see and appreciate the sunlight.

And certainly that was the case here.

If memory serves, to compose this shot, I adjusted the focal point of the Lensbaby ever so slightly, and then set the light metering on the EOS 350D to the “spot metering” equivalent (I honestly don’t remember the technical name for the setting, but it’s the one that meters light from a middle-of-frame circle covering approximately 9% of the image area). That resulted in light being metered for the sunlight in the background rather than the foreground snow and forest (thus preventing harsh overexposure).

In Lightroom, I then boosted the exposure and fill light to restore foreground detail, and did a bit of noise reduction as well to clean the resultant grain up. The result was the shot you see here, O Reader — one I’m really proud of.