Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 120 mm, 1/45 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64. 30-frame focus merge.
On the first Saturday of this year, I woke up to a foggy, freezing morning. Well below freezing, actually. I grabbed my camera gear, dressed as warmly as I could, and started driving. Where we live, driving in any direction will lead to lower altitude, and I ended up below the fog before I reached somewhere to take pictures. So I turned around and tried the other direction. Conditions like this are fleeting, so you really can’t waste much time. I parked at a trailhead that is only a mile or two from my home and started walking.
I have had very few opportunities to photograph hoarfrost, and it is just so beautiful. The morning was almost perfectly still, so focus stacking was an effective way to show off all the detail in the ice crystals. I really like the image above, which is a merging of 30 separate frames. The few brown leaves, muted remnants of a now-distant autumn, stand out as the only color in the scene.
This next image is a another focus stack, this time only using 15 images. I did learn something here, however: I should have done this with a wider aperture. A wider aperture would have blurred the background more (and would have required more than 15 images in the stack, probably, but that’s not a big deal). As taken, the background ended up rather busy, but I was able to smooth it out a bit in Lightroom, so it looks better here than it did to start with. As part of that process, I successfully used Lightroom’s “lens blur” tool for the first time. By “successfully,” I mean that it made the image actually look better. I have tried it a few times before, and it looked truly hideous; when the scene includes slow transitions from in-focus to out-of-focus, it really struggles. In this case, there is in-focus and out-of-focus and nothing in between, so it worked pretty well.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 60 mm, 1/15 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64. 15-frame focus merge.
This next image was just a single exposure—not a focus stack—but Lightroom managed to isolate the background from barbed wire with its lens blur tool on this one, too. The background was blurry to start with, but it looks a little less busy as processed here.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 120 mm, 1/20 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64.
Transitioning to larger scenes, the fog and hoarfrost gave the morning a very muted, low-contrast look that is a lot more subtle than my usual style:
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 54 mm, 1/45 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64.
This next image is similarly muted. The subject owes what background separation it does have to the thin fog behind it. Nothing bold here—it is a quiet, peaceful image.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 89 mm, 1/30sec, f/9.5, ISO 64.
Eventually, I started the long walk back to my truck. Along the way I stopped to take this image, which sums up the feeling of the morning pretty well: cold and peaceful. The warm earthy tones bathed in soft cool light makes for a calm, subdued color palette.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 28 mm, 1/350 sec, f/11, ISO 64.
I hope you enjoyed these recollections of a frigid morning three months ago.
5 responses to “Hoarfrost”
Great images especially of the fence (as edited).
Interesting to read your comments about Lens Blur. I’ve tried it a couple of times, and it was OK. Still need to make sense of the bokeh options, though.
Thank you, Rob! Next time Lightroom asks me for suggestions of what would make it better, I’m going to suggest that they integrate the lens blur tool into the masks. The focus depth map can become a normal masking method (it’s basically a masking function anyway) that you can combine with other things. Then you could apply other adjustments to that selection, as well as combine it with other things. And the lens blur effect itself can just be an effect that you can apply to any mask.
Good suggestion. It feels not unlike the option to select Background in the masking tools.
One of the most difficult and tantalising subjects to time accurately and our metrological friends can’t do so with any great accuracy. Hoarfrost is so unpredictable. So special congratulations to you Jim for such intriguing and delicate studies.
Thank you, Charlie! Well, I didn’t time much of anything, in truth—I just woke up in the middle of it all around me. Clearly, I should sleep in less often!