First Snow of Winter

Wind Shaped Pine and Snowy Beinn na Caillach by Loch Alsh (Canon EOS 250D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM lens at 10mm (16mm full frame equivalent), 1/125 sec at f/16, ISO 400, handheld)

Today we had our first real snow of winter, with snow falling almost to sea level, albeit in small quantities. The morning was overcast but it cleared away to a lovely afternoon with occasional sunny spells.  I took the opportunity, late in the afternoon, to capture this shot, just a few hundred metres from the house.  My regular readers will recognise this old stunted pine tree by the shores of Loch Alsh, with a snowy Beinn na Caillach in the background.  The warm glow coming from the right was the sun setting off to the west, as early as 3pm!

For this photo I post-processed as usual in Adobe Lightroom CC Classic and then exported it to Nik Collection's Silver Efex Pro2 to convert to black & white.  I then applied selective colourisation and other adjustments, resulting in this image with darker de-saturated tones which is a style I have come to like a lot recently.  I then reduced the clarity back in Lightroom to produce a softer effect which I felt worked well with this composition.  For comparison the original Lightroom processed image is shown below (left) with the un-softened de-saturated version (below right)

The second image (below) was shot from the same point (more-or-less) looking east across Loch Alsh towards the hills of Kintail with the same pine tree much more prominent in the foreground this time.  The raw image was treated in much the same way as the above one.

Pine Tree overlooking Loch Alsh (Canon EOS 250D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM lens at 10mm (16mm full frame equivalent), 1/50 sec at f/16, ISO 400, handheld)