When I lived in Scotland, I’d spend a lot of my weekends across the country on the West Coast. Especially in the winter. The scenery is spectacular there, and very sparsely populated.
I took this photo after a short hike across the plateau (not a clever move, I didn’t have appropriate equipment). I left my car on the side of the road in the ditch and looked for this location that I was sure existed somewhere.
My main subjects were the rocks in the frozen river. This was what I was looking for when I realised the river was frozen. So I placed them somewhere in the middle.
But I always try to provide foreground interest, so I included some frozen grass that has lots of details. It could be a semi-abstract shot on its own.
I split the scene with the river banks into roughly 3 equal thirds with the mountains and the sky in the back, the river in the middle, and the grass at the front.
The clouds in the sky form lines that roughly point at the main subject (the rocks). This is mainly due to the very wide angle lens (Sigma 10-20mm) that tends to produce shapes that disappear fast into the horizon.
The main difficulty was to expose everything at once: the sky was very bright (white clouds), the snow on the mountains was fairly pale (it was before sunrise do they weren’t in the sun yet), but the river, the rocks, and the grass were dark in comparison (black and brown). I used a fairly strong ND grad to try to balance things. The grass is a little bit dark, but I left it as it was.
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