Adding the finishing touches to the waters of Vermont

In recent years, Montreal-based nature photographer Rob Servranckx has headed south to northern Vermont for the first half of his June vacation. "For four dawn-to-dusk days, I'm the co-instructor for a photo workshop conducted by Gustav W. Verderber. Many don't understand that, for me, this is not work. It's an opportunity to do and think photography in beautiful locations. It's also fun to share ideas and images with other photographers and to see their reaction when they discover how Singh-Ray filters can improve their images.

"The Green Mountains in northern Vermont include many spectacular waterfalls, beautiful landscapes and magnificent lakes, making it a fantastic area for outdoor photography. I can't imagine going to our workshop without demonstrating how my Singh-Ray filters -- especially the Gold-N-Blue Polarizer and Graduated ND filters -- can help them.

"I find the Gold-N-Blue especially useful to enhance woodland waterfalls and streams surrounded by deep green foliage. For these first two images, I used it to insert a subtle touch of gold in the specular highlights and glaring reflections on the wet rocks and still water, and to gently warm up the deep green foliage. Under cloudy conditions (the only time I shoot waterfalls!), using this filter is enough to slow down the exposure time to about half a second, just about a perfect shutter speed to start blurring the water while holding some detail and texture in the highlights. By adding just a light touch of gold in images like these -- it keeps the image looking very natural.”

“When using the Gold-n-Blue Polarizer on a digital camera, a magenta cast is introduced, but it is very easy to correct for this and get the white balance just right. After shooting my images in RAW mode, I select the white-balance eyedropper in my RAW converter software, place it on the white water, click once... and voila! A perfectly color-balanced image. Another method is setting my camera's custom white balance in the field with the filter on the lens -- it gives me the same results, and allows me to preview the corrected settings on my camera's LCD in the field.”

"One of my favourite destinations during our workshop is Willoughby Lake in northern Vermont. This beautiful lake with pristine waters was carved by glaciers a long time ago. These glaciers created high, fjord-like carvings, with steep cliffs and a deep bowl where the lake formed. There are so many compositions here –- I could easily have spent 2 or 3 days in this one place alone. I really like this composition of the lake, with the skeletal-looking roots reaching towards the skull-shaped rock. This contrasts nicely with the lush greens of the forest and the aqua-colored waters. But the bright cloudy sky was making the exposure a little tough. By very carefully placing my Singh-Ray 3-stop hard-edge Graduated ND filter to follow the edge where the mountain meets the sky, I was able to darken the sky sufficiently to get a great exposure."

You can see more of Rob’s work on the Sojourns In Nature web site and on their blog.