It's been an unusually mild winter here in Ireland so far. Until this week temperatures had been in the double digits and it felt more like spring than the depths of winter. During the last few days however, the weather has started to behave more like it should for this time of the year. We finally had the first real frost of the year and it was a dramatic one at that. When I woke up, everything was frozen and covered in a shimmering coat of sparkly blue and white. I didn't hesitate to grab my camera and get some shots of the frozen landscape before the sun came up and melted everything. I picked up my X100 and headed out the door. While I live in a fairly built up residential area, there is a lovely walk by a stream near where I live and it is always a small refuge of nature in an otherwise concrete world. Even here though the influence of man, or in this case, drunken man, can be seen.
Still, the beauty of nature's freezer is that it can make even litter take on a degree of beauty. Of course, the nature itself is even better. Never underestimate the ability of a macro lens to make the ordinary into some kind of alien landscape....
As the sun began to rise the frost slowly began to melt. It's amazing how fast this happens too. You really have to move quickly to get the shots before it's too late.
I hadn't really used my Fuji X100 in a primarily macro role before, but I was very pleased with the results. I though the relatively wide angle of the lens wouldn't work, but you can get pretty close, so in the end the results were fine. Plus, the wonderful fuji colours always make these kind of shots look good.
Even as the frost began to melt there were still patches of the scenery what were in the shade and retained their icy cocoon. These railing on the little bridge that cross the stream were frozen solid, but the frost makes for a great texture...
And then I found this delicate yellow flower standing alone in the frozen grass...
All in all I had a fun time taking these shots, despite the freezing cold. It was my first real chance to go out and shoot this year, and I appreciated nature putting on such a good show.
I processed the images in Aperture using my own "Quick Lux" presets that I have for sale over on the Aperture Blog. The combination of gentle tweaking and the wonderful colour the Fuji sensor produces make for a great combination when you have nice light and rich colour in the scene. It's a real shame Aperture doesn't support any of Fuji's newer cameras, especially those with an X-Trans sensor, as it looks like the way forward for Fuji. Actually, to be fair, I don't think the current version of Aperture has the capability to support x-trans because it doesn't seem to support any non-bayer standard sensors. Still, I wait in hope they might change this in the future.
