It was a quick trip weekend.  We ended up leaving our house around 11:30am to make the 2.5 hour trip to my mother-in-law’s house.  We spent time with my brother-in-law and his family which was half the purpose for our trip.  My wife’s older sister also came over to visit with us and brought the 4 month old black lab we gave her around Thanksgiving.  Love that dog!  That was the other reason for our trip this weekend.  It all worked out well and was a nice weekend to do some driving.

We returned home by 3pm which left me with some time to go out playing with my camera.  I made a fast grocery run to get our supplies for the week and still was in the woods by 4pm.  The Daily Shoot assignment for today was about liquids and I read a blog post about photographing water and ice.  This all pointed me in the direction of the stream in the woods just down the road from my house.  The sun was out providing just enough light to make this a challenge but luckily for me the stream is down in a ravine which blocked any direct sunlight.

I had a great time exploring the stream looking for interesting combinations of ice and water flow.  I was hoping I could slow my shutter speed enough to get the water to look smooth.  I wasn’t able to get that glass look that I have seen in some pictures but I’m happy with the effect I did manage to capture.  There was a huge assortment of ice formations which made selecting just one picture a little tough for me.  The one I selected had some nice colors in the rocks just below the water.

I stayed away from a lot of heavy processing with this picture and tried a few new techniques I learned recently.  I edited the picture in PS Elements 10 which I am learning more about every day.  I cropped the picture to the 2×3 ratio which removed some unwanted areas in the top of the original.  Due to my camera only saving in the JPEG format I ran the picture through DeNoise 5 to clean it up.  I then adjusted the levels and increased the saturation slightly.  The last enhancement I made to the picture was to create a layer mask for the ice and a high pass filter to just the ice portion of the picture.  I learned this technique from Nick Gatens yesterday and not only did I discover more about Elements it allowed me to enhance the detail of the ice formation.

I have a couple of dozen more pictures involving the stream and the water/ice theme I need to process.  I had a great time trying to capture these pictures.  I’m almost hoping we get a little more winter so I can try this again.