Today is one of those really gloomy days here in Toronto with snow flurries. Not ideal for picture taking since the lighting conditions and visibility are poor. This does not mean you cannot take some interesting shots though. To give you an idea, I took a couple shots from the top of my building. The first is of a chair covered in show and the other is a more distant view of the area. You can notice in both images a few white blotches which are actually larger clumps of show that appears out of focus.

Sometimes if you are lucky, you might get a close up shot of a snow clump in focus in front of the lens with the rest of the image out of focus. This is a very hard shot to take but can be exciting when you do capture one and edit the image for maximum impact.

Here are the details of the image:

F-stop: f/3.2

Exposure time: 1/850 second

ISO speed: ISO-400

Both images do not really convey how hard it is actually snowing outside. To make these images a little more interesting I decided to enhance them using Photoshop CS2. Below are the enhanced versions.

Photoshop Menu Option: Filter/Brush Strkes/Sumi-e

Sumi-e Option:

Strke Width – 3

Stroke Pressure - 3

Contrast – 0

Now the scenic image looks as if it was taken through a frozen window.

Photshop Menu Option: Filter/Distort/Glass

Distortion – 4

Smoothness – 6

Texture – Frosted

Scaling – 100%

As you can see with these examples, you can take an ordinary image and add some impact using Photoshop or some other photo editing tool that has some interesting effects included.