A late morning spent at one of the Wonders of the World, Niagara Falls. It was a beautiful, cold day to visit the Falls. They are heavily coated in ice and snow right now. According to the news, the ice coverage hasn't been this extensive in years.
The biggest challenge (other than staying warm) was finding the perfect spot to get the perfect shot(s) amidst all the other visitors. I don't think I've ever seen so many tourist (or tripods) in all my visits to the area! So, a degree of patience was definitely needed.
The other challenges were exposure and also reviewing the images. It was so exceedingly bright that my viewscreen was almost useless for judging anything. I could see the histogram which did tell me my shots were primarily on the bright end of the spectrum, but I thought that was to be expected. With the bright sun and all the ice and snow I erred on the side of over exposing many of my frames, something I'd typically have done when shooting film. But I was very shocked to see just how bright my images were when I imported them into Lightroom. During processing, I was cutting general exposure from anywhere from 1/3 to a full stop!
Thankfully, I shoot in RAW format, and I was able to pull images back from the nuclear winter of my exposure judgement to something that rendered surprisingly good detail, even in the highlights.
In the end though, I think I could have trusted my exposure meter a bit more than I thought I could.
There were many US license plates in the parking lot on the Canadian side of the Falls. After all, I think we offer the best view...
I couldn't resist turning this image into a tilt/shift photo. It really reminded me of a hyper-realistic model train scene.
True Canadian, through and through!
I love this image because of the lack of scale. Those chunks of ice could be a foot or two thick - or 6 feet! It's very difficult to tell.
These last two are from my Phone and processed using Instagram.
