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Tom Mann

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Inspired by the challenge thread about a winter without any snow, I decide to post some actual photos (not composite images) of what the very first snow of the season looked like in this area.

Yesterday, a friend and I took a nice 7 or 8 mile afternoon hike on the Appalachian Trail just north of Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. While we were on the trail, two things happened. First, the very first snow of this very unusual season finally decided to pay us a visit. It put a delicate frosting on the mountain laurel as well as selectively sticking to cooler surfaces such as downed logs.

The second thing that happened was that while we were on the trail, that region had what I believe was its first earthquake in recorded history. It was only of magnitude three, and we felt nothing even though the epicenter was only about 2 miles from the end of our hike, but it makes for a nice story.

The last photo doesn't show any snow, just a threatening sky, but it is the classic view of the Potomac river, far upstream from Washington, DC, from a place on the AT called, "Weverton Cliffs".

The only cameras we had along were our iPhones (which also had our trail maps stored on them), but they did a nice job in the soft light and with the closeup of the snow crystals.

Enjoy!

Tom M
 

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Argos

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Nice place and pictures, i like the second one, the mark on the base is a little distracting but i dont know what mean, maybe is important XD
 

Tom Mann

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Chris and Argos, thank you for the kind words.

@Argos, the mark on the tree is indeed significant. It establishes as unambiguously as possible that the photo was taken on the Appalachian Trail. This symbol is probably the best known symbol used to denote the 2200 mile long Appalachian Trail here in the states. It is a superposition of an upper case "A" and an upper case "T". The crossbar of the "T" is formed from the crossbar of the "A".

A bit of information and history of the AT can be found in this Wikipedia article.

Tom M
 
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Argos

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Oh nice,thx for the info, you can try to erase the scratch, to not look like a clock, i think that way the mark would gain visual strength.

I apologize for my inglish XD
 

Tom Mann

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Interesting suggestion, Argos.

For scenes like this, in general, I try to subscribe to the code of ethics followed by photojournalists, publications like National Geographic and newspapers, many photographic contests, etc. which, in short, stipulate that submissions can be modified by cropping, global adjustments of brightness, contrast, color, etc., but no adding or deleting items from the image (ie, no cloning in or out, no content aware fill, etc.), no local adjustments (eg, to brightness or color) that would mask features present, etc.

For example, there was the well known case of the fairly well known war correspondent who won a major photographic award, but it was taken away from him when it was learned that the photographer emphasized the darkness of the smoke in a photo of a bomb hitting a middle eastern city. Other cases included "cleaning up" some small bits of litter from the ground in photo that was to be included with a National Geo article.

In this case, the marks you are referring to are saw cut marks. I certainly agree with you that removing them would make the "AT" symbol more visually stronger, but these marks show how the tree got in that position, so I think I'm going to leave the marks alone rather than dealing with two versions of the image, one with and one without the saw cut marks.

Thank you very much for the suggestion and opening this conversation, tho.

Tom M

PS - BTW, one of my landscape images is currently being sold on the National Geographic stock photography website. I would not like to have any questions arise if I submit more images to them in the future, so I'm operating under somewhat different limitations than most amateur photographers when it comes to issues like this.
 

Argos

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Hi, Tom i understand and respect, if i'm no mistaken your example was on World Press Photo award, Of course i made a sugestion on a image on a forum, without knowing you and your standards, now i know XD, i am on a spanish forum of photography and its common analise every little detail, maybe is a bad habit XD.

As i say i like your photos and its a minor detail that can work or not, but dont change almost anything, and of course if you sell photos to national geographic web (congratulations for that ^^) or just like the photos with basic retouch, i respect that.

Cheers.
 

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