Snow Session

On January 9^th, Washu Cosplay and I did a slightly impromptu snow session at Great Falls National Park.  This was possible because of the passing of the Explorers Act which allows photography in a National Park with a model without a permit.  Before you get too excited, the law limits equipment and the size of the party; you are allowed your camera, tripod, and handheld lighting equipment, and the group can be no more than 5 people, which includes the photographer, model, and assistants.  So, there are no big lighting setups or big crews; for big shots, you will still need a permit.    

For this session, I used:

Photography Equipment	Props/Miscellaneous
Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 1 speed light 1 light stand

The set up

For this shoot I was mixing flash and natural light.  In most cases, my model was partially backlighted by the sun.  Thus, I used bare flash to fill in shadows and highlight the face. 

Camera Settings

For the camera setting, I used ISO 100, due to the brightness of the sun and reflection off the snow.  My aperture ranged from F6.3 to F10, with F6.3 and F7.1 being the most common.  My shutter speed ranged from 1/125s to 1/250s with 1/200 being the most common.  My focal length varied from 24mm to 53mm, with the most common focal length being 24mm.   

The Photos

It is important to note that snow images are always hard to edit; because, the camera tends to want to make snow grey from an exposure standpoint, but white balance wants to warm it up too much because of the slight blue tint to snow.  So, the key is to use a grey card, which I had on me but forgot to use, so I had to trust my calibrated monitor and my eye.  Now let’s get into some photo details.

This first image was taken along the path by the second parking lot.  I placed the model on a slanted rock, which had a ledge she could brace her foot against, near the water.  I then placed the flash on the same rock mostly perpendicular to the model’s face.  I was standing about 45 degrees to the right of the flash.  In this case I was using the sunlight coming through the trees to act as a rim light along the model’s back, while the flash acted as the main light.  During post-processing, I removed some tree branches, the seams in the swords, and the seams in the stockings.  I adjusted white balance to warm up the image and reduce the blue and brought the exposure up slightly while reducing the highlights.  Snow is really easy to blow out. I used a medium-contrast tone curve.  I also applied a slight vignette.  Now while I adjusted the white balance to make the image warmer, I then went in and applied a blue on blue color grade, that had a 30-percent saturation in the shadows and a 5-percent saturation in the highlights. This helped keep the image balanced and portray the feeling of icy cold.

Exposure: 1/200s, F6.3, ISO 100, Focal Length: 35mm

This next image involved a little use of Adobe’s AI.  The image was taken at one of the water fall overlooks, and the reason we are not closer to the railing is because there was yellow caution tape blocking our path. The reason you don’t see the caution tape cutting across the middle of the model is because I edited it out of the final image.  The first thing I did was the standard edits of white balance, exposure adjustment and tone curve adjustment.  I then applied a blue (shadow)/orange (highlight) color grade to the image.  I applied about 20-percent blue saturation to the shadows and about a 10-percent orange saturation to the highlights.  I went with the blue/orange color grade to warm up the skin tones ever so slightly.  Then in post I removed the seams in the sword and got rid of the birds in the sky as they just looked like black specks.  The real work was removing the caution tape.  I started by selecting the caution tape and expanding the selection by 5pt. I first tried to use content-aware fill, but that made it look very obvious that something was removed. So, I used Adobe’s generative fill, which matched the snow almost perfectly and was able to work with the shadows.  Honestly, if I had removed the caution tape without generative fill, it would have taken at least 30 minutes, and I probably would have only edited one or two images from that location. Generative fill saved me time and got the model more images to choose from.

Exposure: 1/250s, F10, ISO 100, Focal Length: 32mm

Final Thoughts:

It was nice to be able to use Great Falls National Park as a location, without having to go through the permitting process due to the Explorers Act.  While we did not run into any issues with other people at the park or park rangers, I suspect that was due to it being cold and snowy.  I think if I were going to shoot again at the park, I would go very early in the morning and try to stay on the less popular trails.

Washu Cosplay was a real trooper that day, braving the cold and walking in the snow in heels.  We were able to create some nice images that really captured the essence of the cosplay and the setting of the game the cosplay was from.  You can see all the images from the session here: Eula

Credits:

Cosplay: Eula from Genshin Impact

Models: Washu Cosplay (IG: Washu_Cosplay)