Morning frost / #club100

jpegg (64)Team 250SP 🐟in WORLD OF XPILAR • 9 months ago (edited)

Today I participate in WoX photo contest with the week topic: 'Ice'.
More details on the contest here:
https://steemit.com/@mister-omortson/photo-of-the-week-151-or-contest-post-or-ice

I took a series of dead foliage yesterday in the morning; this stuff always looks amazing with this morning freeze finishing. Also, keeping in mind about the weekly prompt, I focused on the ice. It is not a massive solid ice like you'd have in a Glacier case; but still, its an ice. Ice may be very different, and its an extremely intresting stuff to watch at, if you are fond of macro or abstract textures.

The pics are clickable to see the images in high resolution:

All this beauty is very ephemeral. Once being warmed up by the sun's rays, these tiny ice crystals melt, disappear... you can even see in this photo for yourself that they are no longer (on the upper top of the leaf) - the water glistens there.

To enjoy such works of art that nature creates, several conditions need to coincide: sufficient air humidity (a solid amounts of warm water nearby), a sharp change in temperature - the dynamics from a warm day to a cold night, which is why most often you can see such froze paintings in early autumn in the morning, when night frosts become stronger and stronger, and on warm days nature “wins back”.

But when cold weather comes long and gradually, then all the moisture from the air has time to disappear, and beautiful micro-ice crystals simply has nothing to be built from, and you will see just dead leaves scattered on the ground, instead of such wonderful gems...

Вся эта красота очень эфемерна. Стоит пригреть солнечным лучам, и эти мельчайшие кристаллы льда тают, исчезают... вы даже можете увидеть сами, что на верхней части листа их уже нет - там блестит вода. Чтобы насладиться подобными пролизведениями искусства, которые создает природа, нужно чтобы совпало несколько условий - влажность воздуха (или водоем с теплой водой поблизости), резкое изменение температуры - динамика с теплого дня на холодную ночь, именно поэтому чаще всего вы можете увидеть такие картины ранним осенним утром, когда ночные заморозки становятся все сильнее, а теплыми днями природа "отыгрывает" назад. Если холодная погода наступает долго и постепенно, то вся влага из воздуха успевает исчезнуть, и красивому микро-льду просто не из чего образоваться, и вы увидите на земле просто разбросанные мертвые листья, вместо таких чудесных украшений...

For this leaf I made a series of captures, focusing on it with a little step, adjusting focus point by 1mm on a different areas of the leaf - with a purpose to create a synthetic image with a bigger zone of sharp in-focus details, than you may get naturally from 1 frame. I created 14 frames, some were pretty identical, eventually I used 12 frames to stitch the resulting image in Photoshop.

This macro technology is named 'macro focus stacking', and it is not that hard, if you can use Photoshop on a powerful desktop. Indeed, processing all those images in high resolution is quite resource-demanding... I usually make very simple synthetic images stacking as much as 2-3 frames only; maximum of 20 frames. And real guru of macro photography - who use a tripod, rails, and special software like Helicon - sometimes stack together images from 100 or more frames. Fantastic!

This final image is stacked from 12 separate frames (clickable!)

...with one frame looking like this. The depth of field is not that mush, just 2-3 mm, so most part of the image doesnt have any details, just blur and bokeh. So, what do you think? Does the job worth this final result and all the efforts involved?