Instead of a white winter wonderland, photographers in Central European landscapes are more likely to encounter bare trees and dreary gray. Anyone who suspects that it’s only worth taking the camera again in spring will be amazed at the variety of colorful motifs that the cold season without a blanket of snow has to offer. Radomir Jakubowski gives very practical tips on where photographers can find exciting motifs from landscape to macro. He shows recording ideas in muddy rainy weather, but also in tingling cold.
Luminous mosses draw the eye in landscape shots, while their otherwise inconspicuous sporophytes, which are now adorned with water droplets, play the leading role in a macro shot. Stone structures, small plants or tree bark can also be used as abstract motifs.
Shots with hoarfrost are particularly beautiful. The small ice needles are much more common than snow. Whether it’s icy trees or individual needles on colored blackberry leaves, every photographer will find his or her challenge. The small crystals are tough when it comes to correct exposure, because they fool the camera’s light meter. You can find out how to avoid the trap in the article “Winter with a difference” in the current issue of c’t photography 01/2023.
If the weather stays cold, you will soon find frozen puddles or pools and icicles on moving watercourses. Jakubowski shows how photographers skilfully and dynamically stage such motifs. They don’t even have to drive far. Beautiful shots can also be taken at the rainwater catchment basin of the multi-storey car park or a small clearing at the side of the road.
Winter with a difference
Other issues in the issue
Wide-angle zooms for mirrorless full format. Flawlessly imaging ultra-wide-angle lenses are complex and correspondingly heavy. After all, wide-angle zooms make working with extreme focal lengths more flexible. We have tested four of them in the laboratory and in practice. We looked at the lenses for the mirrorless full-frame cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony and the L-Mount Alliance.
Create photos with AI. New AI software not only optimizes photos, but goes one step further and generates images itself. We show strengths and weaknesses using DALL·E as an example and explain how to create your own creations.
Photography for competitions. Standing on the podium and winning a medal or a valuable prize – that’s what every photographer dreams of. But why does one win the award and another not? Carsten Schröder explains what to look out for when choosing a competition and recording in order to tell a picture story that convinces the jury.
Convert color negatives automatically. If you want to digitize a larger number of negatives, you are often faced with a considerable investment of time. Instead of using a scanner, negatives are quickly photographed. However, the conversion to positive does not work so easily. Plugins for Adobe software help to preserve natural colors. We present three of them: Negative Lab Pro, Grain2Pixel and Negmaster.
New version: Affinity Photo 2. The photo editing software Affinity gets a new version. The Photoshop competitor adjusts the user interface and offers a new raw converter, montage and live masks and a live mesh distortion. We took a closer look at the innovations.
Content of c’t photography issue 01/2023
You can get the current issue of c’t photography (01/2023) for EUR 12.90 in the hot shop. There you will also see a complete table of contents and information about the exclusive online supplementary material that we are now offering via a clearly designed user interface, as well as thumbnails and the editorial. The ePaper and the edition for Amazon Kindle each cost 12.49 euros.
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