week 41: Jurassic?

We've been having some fantastic mist, well that is to say great if you're a photographer, not so great if you're waiting for your plane to leave as I've heard there was some flights grounded due to heavy fog. But since I didn't have a flight booked anywhere I managed to get out early enough one morning to actually get some photos with mist in. If I gotten up earlier that would probably have been even better, but I like sleeping in, especially when its cold.

This photo was taken in the Epping Forest close by my house. I was really taken in by the brown ferns, somehow I've never noticed them before and many not really have now except for the fact that I wanted to plant some ferns and discovered not all ferns are evergreen. I'm sure to most of you this is all obvious, but it came as quite a shock to me.

Anyway, I quite like how in this photo its actually the dead plants that add colour. The combination of the dead trees in the back, the ivy on the front tree, the large ferns and the slight mist made me think of Jurrasic Park - hence the title.

I had to replace the sky as it was completely blownout, but honestly the sky did look very much like that on the day I took the photo. This photo was taken at ISO 800, and it appears way too grainy to me at any level larger than what is displayed here.I tried some noise-reduction, but to make it as smooth as I would like removed so much detail that a subsequent sharpen could not replace that I ended up having to scale back quite a bit on that.

I'm hoping its not too dark on everyone else's monitor. I've recently printed my first photos and they're all a little darker than what it looks like on my monitor (and less saturated) I'm still trying to work out if that's because I should have converted to a different colourspace myself before printing or if it means my monitor is not calibrated correctly.