I guess thinking about the result would make an even greater difference. ;-)
Which boils down to: Decide first what you want to enhance. The white of the ice or the textures on it. After doing that, translate it to the appropriate settings of shutter speed and f/stop. Then shoot and see what happens. Using a digital camera should make that easier, shouldn't it? But if no conscious decision has been made prior to shooting, we still rely on the good will of some coincidence, i.e. CIWYG!;-)
BTW, even white balance doesn't help much if the "mental" photo hasn't sublimed in mind before its physical countepart. So, what did hit your mind the strongest on this scene?
Ah yes, I like the brown frame a lot. I guess I focused too much on the darkish straw not thinking that it would look wrong with white in white. The sky was very white that day without any contrast and the snow was extremely white as well except from close to the thatched roof making it hard to take a decent shot. I guess setting the whitebalance differently could have made a difference? Best wishes Annemette
The ice needles at the left are nicely captured, and thanks heavens outside that kind of white haze in the transition between white and dark brown over them. This haze is also the only weak point of the sharp and very interesting contrast between the white and the brown.
The problem here is the ice itself, as it is neither only glowing white (which would make its overexposure wishable), nor only sharply textured (which would make the many hues of grey on the ice important).
As another rule of thumb, there is no WYSIWYG in photography, even if the digital age would like us to believe it. There is rather WYTIWYG or CIWYG ;-). The latter decreases the number of our possibilities to get a nicely ballanced exposure, but of course increases the number of numismatic units in revenue reports of nowadays photography companies. ;-)
As a side note, the white frame interacts not very nicely with the white of the ice and the white of the HTML page, making the boundaries of your capture almost invisible. Perhaps a brownish hue of the frame helps to avoid that, as shown on the attachment.
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{K:127263} 3/3/2007
