Over a year ago I posted one of the images I took on our brief trip to Sweden in December 2017 at the Storforsens Nature Reserve, a lovely natural park which despite the heavy snow covering and low temperatures was offering some interesting potential for landscape photography. I have recently decided to try and dig a little further on how to best improve my past and future landscape photographs. The best way to experiment is with shots which have potential that I have not yet been able to uncover.
So I decided to return to Sweden (not literally) and reprocess some shots I had waiting to be finished. The following two shots are the result’s of today’s work
For this image I tried to follow the rushing river back down to the hotel resort at the bottom of the hill which you can barely see behind the haze which the falling snow was forming. The hardest part in dark images like this (and taken with my old camera) is the noise. Even at ISO 200 I have plenty of noise, particularly in the trees. I’ve done further experimentation with noise reduction on that, which I hope looks better than it had in the past.
This one gave me a little more to think about, in particular when it comes to where to crop it. I saw the path across the river and decided to make that one of the subjects of the image, but for that to work I had to crop more than I was comfortable to do at first. The lack of comfort isn’t so much about losing precious parts of the image but more worrying about losing quality as the sensor in my old camera really wasn’t that great. But it turned out okay and I like the contrast between the rushing river across the bottom third of the image and the fence across the river leading up the path between the trees and beyond. It won’t earn me a Pulitzer but for a quick experiment on existing images, those turned out okay I think.
Let me know what you think and maybe what you’d have done to make them better still.