Not Easy

We had the most awesome storm last week. The weather forecaster said it would have been 25 inches or better if we'd been cold enough for snow. That much snow would have flattened all my flowers, but I might have shot a bunch more snowflake photos...

We had a great snowfall April 5. I think we got about 9 inches, but most of the flakes weren't so great. I'm still not done editing.

Editing takes a lot longer now. I'm stacking images, and that takes so much longer than just editing photos one by one. But stacked images are SO much better quality than single images.

Not perfect; sometimes far from it. But the clearly focused images are knocking my socks off.

I am so grateful for my garden. But boy, do I miss winter!

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Flaky

Until this year, I typically would shoot two or three shots of each snowflake, hoping at least one shot of each flake might turn out.

When you're shooting with a long lens (I use extension tubes on my macro lens to enable closer focus), the tiniest motion can blur the shot, or wind can move the flake!

I typically would try to get about 200-300 shots during a storm, and I'd typically be happy with 50-75 of the pictures after editing. (Oh, and the best flakes generally are at 15-17 degrees, so it needs to be chilly.) I'd shoot for an hour (or as long as my fingers could tolerate the cold) (plenty of peppermint hot chocolate might be consumed!!!), and editing would take a day or two.

With image stacking, the idea is to intentionally move while shooting as many shots as possible of each flake, hopefully capturing all aspects of the flake in perfect focus. I'm still new at this new method, so I'm trying to get 20-30 shots of each flake. Some of the masters say they shoot 200-300 shots of each flake. My 2006 camera isn't that fast, and my ring flash can't recycle that fast. :) (No complaints!!! I LOVE my camera and my cheap ring flash!)

All similar images are then stacked into one photo, then aligned, then blended, using only the sharpest aspects of each image.

During last month's storm, I shot for about an hour four times, resulting in a total of 1,867 total shots. I finished editing snowflakes from the second batch nearly two weeks later, resulting in 48 surprisingly clear photos from 657 shots. The first outing, which was about 24 degrees, featured a lot of frozen water droplets on each of the 16 snowflakes I shot via 277 images.

A lot of math, I know. A lot more time spent shooting. Also a LOT more card and external hard drive memory! Oh, and more frequent battery recharges. And a lot more time!!! The final two sessions of photos took another two weeks to edit! I think the photos speak for themselves, though. Worth all the extra effort, don't you think?

Once I finished editing the final two batches (62 out of 624 from the 3rd session and 28 out of 309 from the 4th) (which I must say resulted in 154 total snowflakes from 1,867 shots, 73 of which are acceptable and only about 20 I really love), I decided to create a montage of the tiniest flakes I hadn't aimed for. These babies are microscopic. I think I'll continue adding the tiny little flakes to this image as I continue to attempt to perfect my technique, but for right now, I thought this was pretty cool!

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Overexposed

While shooting a sunrise recently, I adjusted the ISO on the camera to accommodate the low light. I forgot to change it back when, an hour or so later, I was treated to a bald eagle flyover.

The photo was washed out and not really salvageable. Artificial intelligence to the rescue!

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