A cold mountain lake near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 16mm f/9 1/160 ISO 100
She stands in the water knee deep and alone, staring off into a landscape that is overwhelming in its beauty. The cold is seeping into her skin, slowing her blood and making her bones ache. It is the kind of cold that takes your breath away, the kind of cold that slows movement at your joints and gives you a headache. Tomorrow morning, before the mists have been burned away by the rising sun she will swim this lake.
My daughter raced in a triathlon in Banff and this was the lake where the swim portion of the course place in. The lake was glacier fed and very cold so I wanted to produce an image that expressed how cold the lake was. First I cropped the image down to produce a more symmetrical tree line at both edges of the frame. I wanted the highest point of the tree lines to be very near the edge of the frame so both sides of the image pull down and in towards the mountain in the background. I also adjusted the crop in the foreground to place the first rock in the very bottom right corner of the frame. These almost completely black shapes pull your eye into the image from the bottom right an out to the mountain in the background. The image of the mountain happens at the intersection of three curves all of which pull your eye in to the centre. This was taken on a bright sunny day so to get the cold feeling I converted to black and white in Nik Silver Efex Pro and then reduced the exposure to darken it and added a cross process in Aperture that introduced the blue tint.
-Russell Berg