There's a beautiful peat bog at the eastern edge of my home city of Ottawa that I visit often. On this day the bulrushes were swaying in a westerly wind and the scene was lit by the low-angled autumn sun. To capture the motion of the windswept bulrushes I set a shutter speed of 1/4 second. The trees in the background were relatively motionless but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't capture them in sharp focus with the slow shutter speed. This mattered because I wanted to contrast the blur of the bulrushes with the sharp stillness of the trees. Maybe the elevated boardwalk I stood on was vibrating slightly. Who knows? Point was, I needed an easy solution. I took a second exposure (not shown here) at a fast shutter speed to freeze the trees. In photoshop I combined the top part of the the fast-shutter image with the bottom part of the slow-shutter image. I had used a neutral density filter for the slow-shutter image, and removed the filter for the fast-shutter i
It's amazing what a difference a crop can make. Yes, the BEFORE image needed more work than just a crop, but cropping was a critical step in transforming it from something with potential into a photograph worth looking at. Fall colors come early in Canada's far north. This photo was shot in late August near Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, about 100 km south of the Arctic Circle and also just south of the "tree-line" - the point beyond which trees do not grow. The striking thing about the nearly treeless landscape is the sense of space, which is precisely what I was trying to convey by radically cropping the BEFORE image and changing the aspect ratio to 2:1 from 3:2. You'll notice that I cropped almost entirely from the top, leaving the horizontal content of the frame virtually unchanged in the AFTER image. In other words, what's visible between the right and left sides of the frame is nearly identical in the BEFORE and AFTER images, but the