One of my favorite images from this year

"Manifestation"

I shot this a few weeks ago. I'd been waiting a few years for some very specific conditions: sustained freezing temperatures, minimal snow and lots of sun. All three of these things don't happen often together in Vancouver. It's difficult to get a shot of all the beautiful greens surrounded by icicles, because by the time the ice has form in significant amounts, snow has fallen.

But finally it happened. I went out to where I knew some icicles would form and did my best to get a shot. It was difficult because my camera needed to be in a very small space that a person can't fit inside of, so I was operating it blind and from the front. I was standing on icy rocks and had to duck down every time I fired the shutter so that I wouldn't ruin the photo. Care also had to be taken to not break the icicles as I was operating the camera.

In the end I didn't like the image. The light wasn't quite good enough, and neither was my framing. I waited again for the weather and went back a few days later, plus I installed the Nikon app on my phone so that I could use it as a remote viewfinder. The light was perfect and I was able to dial in my composition as if I were behind the camera. The icicles had grown larger as well.

That, however, was only the first battle. This is a technical image that required hours of painstaking Photoshop work. The icicles were only two inches from my lens, so I needed a significant focus stack to get everything in focus. Due to how close the icicles were compared to everything else, changing the focal point for the purpose of stacking also created a significant shift in perspective. This meant I had to stack everything manually, as it was impossible for algorithms to perfectly align everything. And then I had to do it all over again since this is actually a panorama! All together 24 shots were used to assemble this image.

Other issues to deal with were icicle motion blur, as they were literally growing as I was shooting this image, and a huge range in luminosity.

If you look closely, I am actually in this image. I was wearing a red jacket and you can see my reflection at the bottom of the second icicle from the left!

Ultimately it was worth the effort!

Base image settings:

10mm (full frame), f/16, 5s, ISO 100. Some exposures were up to 20 seconds long to get the dark details.

Let me know if you have any questions!


Find me elsewhere on the web:

Tutorials: tristantodd.gumroad.com
Website: tristantodd.photography
Twitter: twitter.com/tristan_todd_
IG: instagram.com/tristan.todd



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19 comments
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Far out that's a lot of work for one (great!) photo!!! !LOL I hope this is your paid work well beyond the world of Hive.

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Honestly can't say I enjoyed the Photoshop side of things very much because it was rather tedious and boring. But it was a fun test of my ability to use the camera, especially before I installed the remote viewfinder app 😂 Fully manual lens as well which made things trickier, even with the app.

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😂 Haha. !LOL
I would have zero patience for all the editing but like you, I love the exploring 🙌

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The exploring and connection with nature is definitely the best part and the main reason I do it!

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Nice ce hunt!
It looks great this picture!

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Wow

This goes into the hall of fame of "things we do for photography".

When I started reading, I was wondering if you could probably have used a remote control or summat 😅

The image is so dreamy 👏🏿

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The remote helped a lot! Not sure if I'll go back to shooting blind for images like this, although I enjoyed the challenge.

Glad you like the image so much :)

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The result looks very good! Welldone!
These are the kind of shots that drones will capture so well for video... because of the tight spaces and all.

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Might even be too small for the drone, not sure even a Mini would fit in there without chopping the icicles down! Haha

The panorama at 10mm makes it look 10x bigger than it is!

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Ohh... I see. Must really be a tight space.

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(Edited)

I was curious to see what this would look like in black and white, so I took the liberty of applying some slapdash editing in GIMP. In my opinion, it loses more than it gains. I prefer your full color version.

monochrome icicles.png

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I'll say I agree with you and prefer the color as well. The greens are too important to me :)

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