Sledging

On Saturday Bex and I went out for another walk in the snow. We decided to  go into town to capture some different scenes buried under the snow. But when we got there we found that a lot of people were already there; most of them on some sort of sledge, or tin-tray if a sledge was un-available! So instead of moving onto another area we decided to stay and take photos of the various people who were sledging down the hill.

I tried experimenting with various techniques; the most successful being the panning technique. For this I put the camera into shutter priority and used a relatively slow shutter speed, in this case 1/125^th of a second, to make the background become blurred. I put the camera into Ai Servo mode so the focus would track the subject as it moved down the hill. I also used the camera with continuous drive mode turned on so I could take multiple shots as they slid past.

When editing the photo I was expecting to do quite a lot of work to the photo. But when I did edit the photo I was happily surprised that I didn’t need to change very much. That being said I did change a few things that I thought required editing: mainly the light levels and the noise/sharpness. I increased the contrast and lowered the shadows to make the light levels more dynamic. I decreased the noise quite a lot because the photo was taken at a high ISO, then after this I increased the sharpness to counteract the loss of detail accompanied with the noise reduction.

We both enjoyed our excursion into the city, we were both surprised how different it looked under the snow though. We both took a lot of photos over the course of the weekend and we should be able to show off the snow even after it all melts away!

Mat