Christmas Come and Gone

Park Avenue and 92nd Street today at about 11:30 am.

Rinsed the shot through the new NIK HDR filter. Yeah, I hate hdr. But this filter actually seems to pull out details without getting obnoxious about it.

The hasn't been a hell of a lot of traffic today, what there was just seemed to slip, slide and spin around a bunch.

Wind was pretty fierce, took the camera bag off my shoulder a couple of times.
Made it a bit into the park, but my snow boots, fancy Eddie Bauer type, kept untying themselves and dumping snow around my ankles.

Mayor Mitchell (the golden chap on the left) seems to be taking the whole thing in stride, however.

The contrast range presented by the snow was easily handled by the camera. Good old 16 bit raw files.

The challenge of shooting snow is in keeping the tones light enough to look like snow, retain detail, and not just go gray and blah...

Although, as has been pointed out to me by my kindly old mother, pure white and pure black just don't exist as pigments or pixels. We are dealing with approximations.


And yes, gang, we have found the joy of panoramas! No more moping about not being able to afford panorama cameras! Stitching software that works!

Apparently, the thing that helps the most is not to shoot with a wide angle lens, but glom together a whole set of telephoto images (again, on the left...).

These guys are probably wishing they were wearing something.