How we photographed Seaham Hall
We were recently asked to pop down to Seaham Hall after a night of snow to take a Christmas image for them to use for their promotional material. It wasn’t until quite late in the morning that we finally got there, as the snowfall meant we couldn’t get out of our office until the roads had been cleared.
Ideally, if you want to take images in the snow you need to get there early when nobody has had the chance to leave footprints. Arriving late often means that getting the result you want is impossible, but here’s a quick example of how digital photography can help out. Following on is a quick step by step guide explaining how we managed to get the shot. Clicking on any of the images will take you to a larger view.
The original image is shown here below.
It’s a compromise. It attempts to keep detail in the snow and sky whilst also still recording shadow detail. The camera hasn’t done a bad job, but it’s a pretty uninspiring image with a lot of distracting tracks in the snow.
The first step was to make two separate images from the original Raw file. These are shown below:
The left image is the original file adjusted in Adobe Lightroom to expose for the sky, and the right image takes care of the snow, water feature and main building. Note that all the examples in this post including the two above are from the same single image file at the top of the post. We increased the saturation in the image on the left a little to enhance the natural colours that were already present in the sky.
Next on the list was to deal with the footprints and tyre tracks in the snow:
We took the image which was exposed for the main house and the snow, cropped it slightly and added a Photoshop glow filter. This made the snow nice and white but also made it much easier to airbrush out footprints. We used a mixture of the clone tools and a white airbrush to do this. We increased the saturation of the colours slightly because we wanted the colour of the steps of the water feature to stand out from the snow rather than just merge into it. This also enhanced the blue reflection in the windows.
Adding the glow filter has had the side effect of completely blowing out the detail in the sky, but this isn’t important – we’ll deal with that now:
We added the image we created which exposed for the sky as a new layer and used the pen tool to draw a path around the sky section of the image. We then deleted everything else below that so that the image behind showed through – that of the correctly exposed house and snow. So, we now have a composite image – one image made up of two separate files. However, this has all evolved from one single exposure. It’s still the sky recorded on the original frame, it’s just exposed correctly. Once we had done this we tweaked the exposure of the overall image to balance it.
Now just a little tidying up to do:
We noticed that the buildings on the right could do with a lick of paint, so that’s what we did. We also increased the brightness of the section running off to the left of the main house, and we added a window where there used to be a shutter.
The final result is here. Compare it to the first version at the top of the page.
We corrected the verticals so that the walls of the house were straight rather than converging, and the job was done.
This is how we like to use Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom. For us it’s to enhance what’s already there. The sky was the actual sky there that day, and the colours were all in the original Raw file, they just needed drawing out. The only bit of faking that was carried out was the removal of the footprints and tyre tracks in the snow – but we were only restoring the scene to how it would have looked if we’d mange to get there earlier.
For us, Photoshop should always be used for the benefit of the final image. There are lots of features, filters and actions that can be used, but they should always be used sympathetically, and never just because they are there.
