Colour: the medium we humans see everyday life in (discounting the illness of colour blindness, that is.) It's the fundamental platform upon which so much is both judged and taken for granted by the human condition.
I'm a big advocate of monochrome photography but I believe it has a place. I tend to favour it when the light is at its harshest and most acute during daytime, and also usually during winter conditions. Therefore finding colour in winter landscapes is a challenge I frequently set for myself.
This is a topic I will touch upon - and probably labour upon if the truth be told - earnestly and quite frequently. That's because it bolsters and enhances an image and that's precisely why we use post-processing techniques to apply it.
Last weekend was a typical case in point; the early forecast was for a decent sunrise with 80% cloud cover so I'd planned to break out the six-stop ND filter at dawn, find some half-decent foreground interest and call it a day. By the time I actually arrived at my destination - Pymatuning Reservoir straddling the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line seventy miles away - that forecast had changed utterly. Not for the better, either.
Low stratus cloud cover blanketed the sky. To my amazement while wandering around, tears opened up along that cloud cover in the eastern sky as the sun was due to breach the horizon. With no foreground interest in my location, I used a line of trees to capture an image of the sunrise through them. The fractures in the cloud closed within minutes and my opportunity was gone, so I captured the image with some fervour and quickly paying attention to my camera settings. Working under pressure like this means it's vital to be able to instinctively work in manual mode.
That concluded any interesting colour for those sweeping vistas. The remainder of the shoot was going to have to concentrate upon more intimate shots to eek out any degree of interesting splashes of colour to my images.
I found two such opportunities in the lifeless, wintery landscape. The first was a seldom-used road in a lakeside resort among the trees. The remaining leaves were a mixture of light browns and ochre. It's surprising how, along with the leading lines from tyre marks in the snow on the road itself to add perspective to a wide-angle shot, they generated so much interest to the image. The second was altogether more straightforward: an old pick-up truck sitting at a garage of sorts amid all manner of other old machinery, cars and general mechanical detritus. The truck's striking verdant looks literally begged for an exposure!
