This morning I spent some time cleaning and deleting Lightroom collections. A bit of housekeeping in my digital archive has been necessary but neglected at the same time. I found this small collection of images of toy trucks in the snow. Looking at them made me feel refreshed. As much as I dislike the New England winter, seeing it in summer has some positive effect on me. That’s why I am sharing these images now, on a nice, hot day. In the meanwhile I will keep looking for my 2008 surf images. If I could decide between beach and mountain, the beach will win hands-on.
I realized that outputting snow is really difficult. I think it still looks too grayish and not consistent in these images. They looked fine in Lightroom but once they get exported into jpegs they seem to change slightly. Snow is so delicate in imagery as it is in real life. A lot of photographers get screwed up white balance, lost detail, or heavily underexposed images. Even if you get it right in the exposure and in Lightroom, it sometimes just doesn’t look right when you output it for the web. I wonder if that comes from the limited color space in sRGB. Why do we even have to deal with various color spaces? How come that in 2011 all the equipment still needs to be calibrated and still it doesn’t work well. How come that calibration itself is so complicated that only super geeks can figure it out? Who understands Gamma? Why can’t it be as simple as toys in the snow. Anyhow, enjoy the summer. Winter is still far away.
I took these images with a Canon 5D2 and a 35mm 1.4L lens.
What we call “detail” is created by variations in color. At both the black and white ends of the lightness scale, there isn’t much room to work to create color variation. The human eye is far better at perceiving variations than the ability of screen or print to reproduce natural variations. And in the increased limitations of color spaces like sRGB, and it becomes extremely difficult to pull off what you’re trying. That said, nice photos!
Hi Tim
Would there ever be a standard? Could devices self-calibrate? It is strange how the same monitor doesn’t show any image vignetting in Lightroom but once I output it it is clearly visible.
Have a great week. D!RK