3.12.2018

One Photo: Some Simple Symmetry


This was supposed to be a simple record shot of the season’s biggest storm. [Maybe a record shot is all it is; but I really like it.]

Starting Wednesday evening, we received a dump of over 14” of heavy wet snow during the “dark hours” (6pm to 6am). It is hard to believe it didn’t rain because surface temperatures never got below 35F degrees, so you can imagine how moisture-full the snow was.  I spent most of the night awake listening to trees and limbs breaking and crashing to the ground.  With gusts of wind as high as 40mph, it sounded like a train was traveling through our property.  We lost eight trees.  All maples with trunks about 8-10” in diameter. They basically snapped in half.  The good news is there was no damage to house or cars.  We did need to have some immediate chainsaw work as one tree covered our driveway. With no driveway access, then there’s no way to get fuel for the generator!

Anyway, back to the image below and some comments about processing the raw file in Lightroom.

The image after cropping and processing

This was taken on our porch looking out to a small deck and into a forest of maples beyond the snow covered lawn.  I did not see the entire symmetry of the image until I inspected the image on my computer monitor, and noticed with some cropping that even the tree in the background added symmetry to the image.  I had not noticed that when I framed the image initially.  There are so many times that I see things on my monitor that I never saw through the viewfinder.  Sometimes that is good, sometimes it is not. This time it was good.

Here’s what I did:

Photo as originally composed and exposed.

Using the Transform panel I made a full adjustment for level, vertical, and horizontal

Cropped to make symmetrical

In the basic panel I clicked on "auto".
In the detail panel I sharpened to 50, detail and masking to 25.

That's it!  Now it's time to shovel off that deck...

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