Caucasus Mountains, Georgia
Phase One A-Series, IQ3 100MP sensor, 180mm Rodenstock, f11 @ 1/60 second, ISO 50. 

I am accused (sometimes rightly) of using a lot of colour in my photography. Disingenuous critics suggest I have a 200% colour saturation slider, but I like to think that when my colour looks saturated, it’s just as much about a commensurate lack of colour in the surroundings.

We’re often told to lighten up our subject and darken our background as this draws the viewer’s attention to what’s important in the frame. This is great advice as long as your subject works this way – sometimes you want a dark subject against a light background – but the principle is a good one: use graphic devices to accentuate what you want to show in your photograph. In addition to exposure, you can use contrast and colour.

Sometimes the graphic work is more or less done for you at the time of capture. Or perhaps I should say, sometimes you’ll find your subject is already giving you a strong hint about how to resolve it in post-production. This snowy landscape is such an example.

Driving through the Caucasus mountains in Georgia one snowy morning, the road ran along the side of an alpine valley covered with pine trees which in turn were blanketed with a fresh dusting of snow. The timing couldn’t have been better because the snow had no trouble hanging onto the pine tree leaves, but was slipping off what are possibly the spindlier birch trees – leaving their red bark clear to see. This is what I noticed, but to emphasise this, I framed the subject to remove an unnecessary sky and a busy foreground. The telephoto lens is a great landscape photography tool.

In post-production, I began by ensuring the snowy whites were snowy greys, although very light in tone. Obviously too much white would hide all the remarkable detail in the trees, so precisely adjusting the exposure for these areas was a priority. From there, it was just a matter of brushing in a little more colour saturation on the red trees.