The snow’s blue cast in mine was the result of my earlier processing, not the image (from what I could tell).
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I’d thought about cropping out the sky like this one and the following from @paulmiller but ‘chickened out’. It’s true that the sky’s colours and depth sit a bit incongruously with the relative flat planes of the landscape. I tried to compensate for that by lightening the sky to remove contrast and in my second version by boosting the colour of the yellow reflections in the water but it’s not entirely successful, I think
I like the full 3:2 ratio but it leaves the problem of what’s the subject, the ground or the sky. I think the one by @age is a good compromise where the sky hints at a lifting in the gloom below.
For one it doesn’t fit so well in the tonal range and second, the landscape itself doesn’t need the sky, I think. The sky doesn’t add much, so to speak.
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I also tried to use HDR with some bracketed shots, first with Luminance HDR, which did quite a nice job of producing jpegs but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to get it to export a tiff for editing purposes. The manual said just export a tiff, from what I could see, but no info on how and then it kept coming up with an error message. There was a comment on one forum from some High Priest or other in response to someone’s query about it that said ‘it’s very powerful but you need to know what you’re doing, like Darktable…’ Sweet. Hugin was easier but the output with my efforts wasn’t substantially different from what I could do with a single RAW file.
You are welcome 
.
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A tripod is always the best solution, but I think you’ve captured it well at 1/25 and what you might’ve done in a pinch is open up the aperture a stop or two seeing as you’re on a M43 camera and there’s no extreme foreground in the shot.
At 32mm and f/9 on M43 your hyperfocal distance is 7.6m, if you open up to f/5.6 it becomes 12m which wouldn’t have had too much effect if any on the IQ in the foreground. Do you recall where you were focused? Aiming for something in front of your main subject can be a good way to game the depth of field in these situations. I would not be so used to the cold an no doubt shivering all over the place and probably wouldn’t have hesitated going to f/4 even and quickening up the shutter a bit too.
Always easy to diagnose after the fact of course, but I definitely think its underexposure more than anything that hurts the image here.
Having said that I think you’ve done a remarkable job processing it. Reads very well at a distance, its only at 100% you notice the areas where it’s starting to break down.
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Thanks. That’s useful info. I’m pretty sure I was just focusing on the main trees in the hope that that would give enough dof for the background and the foreground. In a general landscape I tend to use the rule of thumb of focusing at around one third of the way into the scene. I doubt that I’m very good at judging that or whether that heuristic stands up. I should find some more resources on dof to read up on or do some real world testing as I’ve often come back and found that infinity is slightly out of focus when I didn’t mean it to be
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The trouble I have with the calculators is that they only take into account your image format size and standard circle of confusion assumptions to determine the field that’s going to be “acceptably sharp”. Acceptably sharp with HP5+ pushed to 1600, compared to Delta 100, compared to a Nikon Z 7II are totally different concepts, despite sharing the 35mm format. The zone focus markings on an AI-S lens work perfectly on an F3, but they’re at least a stop too generous on my D700.
I think film also has a degree of forgiveness in the sharpness of the exact plane of focus. I’m going to suppose that’s due to it having some amount of depth in the emulsion, whereas a sensor I’m guessing is perfectly flat. I haven’t noticed it so much in landscape photography, but it’s quite possible in portraits to have the focus point ever so slightly beyond the eye such that the eyes are still more than “acceptably sharp” and look amazing, but you’ll notice some hair on the side of the head that’s tack sharp and terribly distracting. On film you could get it wrong like that, but whether the focus was actually behind the eye or on the tip of their nose or whatever it was never so sharp as to draw the viewers eye away.
Focusing two thirds of the way isn’t a bad rule of thumb, but at larger apertures I’d be thinking about my subject a bit more, and at smaller apertures I’d be tempted to bring the focus point even closer, particularly if I had stuff in the foreground.
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This is great advice. Thanks. I should revisit my basic photography technique books again
Quite far away from reality. Anyway, here comes a different mood:
20240118_0054_01.RW2.xmp (22.2 KB)
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Added 3.5 stops EV
Color Calibrated for white snow
FilmicRGB auto white
Rotated 1° clockwise
Cropped for 4x6
Ansel ge2c4a0a
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I’m still fascinated by this lovely scenery. And I’m happy, that I’m heading to Scotland in March. Hopefully I’m able to catch some magic moments.
Another play with the colours:
20240118_0054_03.RW2.xmp (19.5 KB)
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Have I already told you, that I like this pic 
A more freezy version:
20240118_0054_02.RW2.xmp (14.0 KB)
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Cool. Hope the weather is good! Also, I’m no expert and not a Scottish native, but let me know if you have any questions.
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We will see. I hope at least it is not bad, but we’ll take what we get. I love Scotland. It’s been far too long since we’ve been there.
We are travelling every year to Britain, but most of the time we don’t have enough time to visit Scotland. So this time we fly directly to Edinburgh and are heading in direction to Skye, concentrating on Skye and the Highlands.
Cool. I’ve only really spent about half a day driving around Skye, or through, on the way to the ferry for Harris. I’d like to do the prop plane flight to Barra that lands on the beach one day