Snowstorm at U of T

Here's the aftermath of a snowstorm that hit Toronto just before midnight on New Year's. All shots are taken on the University of Toronto campus, downtown with my 10-20. None of these are HDR - my PP generally involved splitting up the snow, sky and foreground into separate layers, and doing a separate levels adjustment on each. Please let me know what you think! Shot #5 is my personal favorite from this set.

1.

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Aww crap. I fly back to Toronto on Friday, and I live at Trinity...(that's right, number 3 is where I live hahaha).

#1 could use some straightening... #5 is great. Gotta love U of T... many of my friends went there and I have many memories (or lack of memories from booze) of the campus!

perryge wrote in post #4614321
Aww crap. I fly back to Toronto on Friday, and I live at Trinity...(that's right, number 3 is where I live hahaha).

Don't worry. By that time it'll all melt as usual...

ErikM wrote in post #4614509
#1 could use some straightening... #5 is great. Gotta love U of T... many of my friends went there and I have many memories (or lack of memories from booze) of the campus!

Thanks for the comments Erik! I noticed that about #1 myself, but got a little lazy.:o I'll definitely go back to that one & fix it up. U of T is great... and quite photogenic!

Just uploaded a straightened & reprocessed version of #1.

Nice pictures especially #3. We get a little bit of snow here in Toronto and everyone gets miserable. This has to be the warmest winters ever for this city.

I've never seen snow before, so seeing something like this is just amazing! of course currently in 40C temperature, i'd love to be there right now! i'm loving #1 gives me a chilled look AND feel!

elysium17 wrote in post #4624403
Nice pictures especially #3.

sektr09 wrote in post #4628306
i'm loving #1 gives me a chilled look AND feel!

Thanks for the comments guys!

Are those HDR's? Id love to see more of that building in # 1, maybe a pano when you get a chance?

squashed wrote in post #4629266
Are those HDR's?

Nope. As I said in the original post, none of the shots are HDR. The effect was achieved in pp using levels.

Great pics! You said you split up the snow and the building into separate layers to PP. Sounds tedious, or perhaps you have a trick to it? I'd love to know...

deletedpenguin wrote in post #4637659
Great pics! You said you split up the snow and the building into separate layers to PP. Sounds tedious, or perhaps you have a trick to it? I'd love to know...

Thanks! The pp on each of these pics took me about 5-15 minutes, so it wasn't too tedious... The thing is that since I was only dealing with levels adjustments on the separate layers, I didn't really have to be too exact in separating the buildings from the snow & sky.

Basically, here's what I've done for most of these. First I made 3 copies of the original photo's layer (for the sky, building, and snow). Then in each layer I took a nice fat ~300 pixel eraser to get rid of the parts I wasn't interested in & then made a more precise cut with a 50 or 100pixel eraser. So in the end I had the sky, building, and snow on 3 separate layers. Then I just did a levels adjustment on each until I was happy with the result. Of course whenever I wanted a sky that was dramatically darker than it was in the original shot, I had to be more careful with splitting the different parts of the image into their layers. You can actually see I was a little sloppy in that respect in #5, if you look closely at the spot where the roof meets the sky... But anyways, it worked for me, and I like the level of control it gave me over the different parts of the images.

Cool photos I like 1, 4, and 5.

Those are awesome! I go to waterloo and we get a bit more snow there than we get here in Toronto, but most of the waterloo buildings aren't picture worthy I would've still given it a try but sadly I'm in toronto now