Snow Photos

Specs

Hardware: Smartphone—Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Samsung Droid Charge
Software: Photoshop, for post-processing
Dimensions: 1086 x 420
Filesizes (t to b): 80 KB, 104 KB, 98 KB, 128 KB, 69 KB, 26 KB

Description

Overview

These are photographs that I took at work with my personal smartphone. They appeared on the website that I maintained. I used them as backgrounds for a news slider. The slider served as a means to post news announcements, with a text box appearing over the left side of the photo. For some of the photographs, I tried to keep the most interesting parts on the right or otherwise flipped the photos so that the item in focus was on the right. Further still, I tried to compose some photos so that the subject was angled in a way to draw the eye to the lower left. Drawing the viewer’s eye to the lower left would help move interest towards the first item under the photo/news slider.


Details

All of these photos received some sort of post-processing, but not too much. Regarding the top photo, I used the warp tool to straighten the trees on the left due to the distortion caused by my phone’s wide angle lens.
 
The second photo is a zoom-in (optical zoom) of the trees from a distance, and then I applied a sharpen filter to the photo.
 
I also applied the sharpen filter to the two bush photos, but I didn’t do anything else to those photos. I considered cleaning up the berries with either the patch or spot healing tools, and even softening the bright areas of the second bush photo, but I decided to keep those aspects of the photos as-is.
 
The “Curved Tree Line” photo did not receive any post-processing effects at all. As with all of the other photos, it’s a crop of a larger photo.
 
The last photo, “Footprints in the Snow,” has a cooler temperature filter that added some blue to the photo. The added blue made the environmental conditions at the time the photo was taken seem cold. I didn’t use that filter for the top photo because I wanted to preserve the freshness of the snow; keeping the scene/snow white was appropriate. Adding a cool temperature filter would not have worked because it would have made the scene seem too frozen.

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