How we photographed Matfen Hall
Everything looks pretty in the snow, and we often find that we’re quite busy photographing when the white stuff arrives! Just before Christmas we photographed Seaham Hall when the first snow of the winter fell – you can read about how we did that by clicking here.
Northumberland was treated to a second wave of snow on New Years Eve, so we were asked to make the journey to Matfen Hall to do the same.
The main obstacle with taking the image of Seaham Hall was that firstly the front of the building was in shadow, and secondly there were loads of footprints from the early morning hotel checkout. This wasn’t the case at Matfen Hall. We were lucky as when we arrived the hotel was bathed in gentle sunlight, and the snowfall was so deep that the sensible residents had stayed next to the log fires sipping brandy!
The original image is here (note you can view a larger version of any image by clicking it):
It’s been taken on a 30mm prime lens, at an aperture of f8. We needed to make sure that the depth of field was sufficient for both the hotel in the background and the swans in the foreground to be in focus. The image was overexposed by 2 stops to make sure that the snow (and swans) came out white rather than grey. A camera’s metering system assumes a scene is of an average tone of 18% grey, so when the scene is predominantly white you need to compensate.
So we’ve got white snow, and the image has been fairly accurately exposed with reasonable sky detail. However, we prefer to recover detail in the sky so, just like the Seaham Hall shot, we used the same raw image and processed it twice – once for the sky then again for the rest of the scene:
The image on the left is the version exposed for the sky. The foreground is too dark, but that doesn’t really matter at this stage. We layer the original lighter image on top of the dark image then created an adjustment layer and removed the overexposed parts of the image so that the correctly exposed darker version below shows through, but only where we want it to. The image on the right shows this top layer after we have removed the sky and a little of the foreground water detail (the chequered background in Photoshop shows that this part of the image is transparent).
The result is this:
This is an improvement, but the image still lacks punch. Using the curves and vibrance tools in Photoshop we can gently give the image a little more contrast and increase the saturation of the colours without blowing them out.
The last step was to increase the luminance of the hotel and it’s reflection. We used the Viveza plug-in from Nik Software which allows you to isolate specific colours and apply adjustments to them without affecting the rest of the scene. We did the same with the sky, slightly increased the overall saturation of all colours, and that brings us to the final image below:
We now have an image with correctly exposed highlights and shadows, white snow, foreground detail and a vibrant main subject with a matching reflection. All in all a good days work, in fact ultimately the hotel decided to use the image for the cover of their Christmas brochure!
