That’s what everyone calls it when they first look at it. “Is that a wave?” I admit, it does sort of look like a wave with some stop action photography. But no unfortunately its not. This is one of my ode to one of my favorite photographers, Art Wolfe. I call this photo, “The Mississippi Frozen in Time.”
Earlier this year in January, when the midwest was brutally cold for a stretch. I went with a friend out to take photographs. We were actually out trying to find some eagles to shoot as every winter the eagles come down from the north to hang out for the winter around the Mississippi River corridor.
We ended up towards the end of the day near the old Chain of Rocks bridge near Granite City, Illinois. As the sun was going down and it had become a little too dark for photographing eagles we decided to wait and see what kind of sunset we were going to get across the river.
Since it was January, the ice flows coming down from up north had started stacking up at various points along the river leaving lots of jagged ice sheets all along the river banks. Maybe giving us some kind of subject to add to the sunset.
The sunset seemed to start to produce some cool colors, however, it really needed something more in the foreground to give the image a lot of depth and really make it more than just some pretty colors in the sky. Messing ’round on the ice, I found a tiny, little ice formation, a little 4-inch tall curved icicle sticking up out of the sheet of ice on the river bank.
So I climbed out on the ice and laid down on the edge of the ice, right up behind the “wave.” I had my wide angle Canon 17-55mm lens on, which has a really short focusing distance. What that means is that you can get right up close to the subject and still be able to focus on it.
This picture was one of my first attempts at an HDR image. Its formed from 2 different exposures. The first was exposed for the sunset, which left the wave underexposed. The second exposure was for the wave, which resulted in the sky being overexposed. They were then combined in Photoshop Elements 8. Here’s the resulting image. I hope you enjoy.
- Canon 40d, ISO 320, Canon 17-55 IS f2.8 @ 17 mm, f8, 1/30 sec & 1/60
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