Spring Signs

A little late/early depending on your point of view, but as we're starting to head into the closing months of the year I thought it'd be nice to have a snapshot of what we will be able to enjoy again soon!

On a rather chilly January morning I spotted the first signs of new growth for the coming spring whilst walking in the Ivel Springs nature reserve in Baldock!  I liked the way the almost monochrome ground cover was in sharp contrast to the green of the new shoots and so I decided to make this even more extreme, by turning it into a black and white background whilst maintaining the bright green shoot.

The original shot before post-processing.

This image was shot on my old EOS450D and hand held to allow me to get low enough to the ground.  To cut out all hand shake I took the image at 1/125th of a second and to make a limited depth of field I used an aperture of f/6.3.  Due to the pretty poor light, it being an overcast day under the cover of trees I had to use an ISO of 800, about as high as my old camera would go before the image became unacceptably grainy.  I used my long telephoto at its maximum zoom of 500mm so I could shoot from the walked area around the path and not damage any other new growth in the area.  I had no flash unit with me so had to rely on the natural light, I'm not sure flash would have been useful anyway for the image I had in mind!

Post-processing was, surprisingly, very simple.  I copied the active layer to give me my working layer that would become the black and white bit; then I used the magic extractor tool to very carefully select everything but the bright green bit (in more technical speak I made the bright green the background (negative) and the rest the foreground (positive)).  Once the selection was made I simply clicked the convert to black and white and bingo, once flattened the image was finished.

The final image.

If anything is wrong with this it could possibly be argued that the image doesn't follow the rule of thirds, it's very close in height but centrally placed across the screen.  I see no problem with the way it is composed, in fact I would say the centrepiece is not exactly central, put that right with a crop and I'd be happy!

Roll on spring 2013!