SNOW DAY

For any number of reasons, I have been very neglectful of my Skeptic Photo blog.  But this past Sunday we had what can only be described as a beautiful snowfall, around six inches of heavy, wet snow that clung to trees and whatever else the wind blew it against.  So I got inspired and grabbed my camera to get a few pics in Virmond Park, the county park situated on the bluff above Lake Michigan a few miles from my home.  

Actually I went out twice, once in the late morning, when the wind was causing the snow to fall more or less sideways, and again in mid afternoon, when more snow had fallen.  Here are some to the shots that I took, first from the morning.

I will confess that I modified all of these shots to some extent.  First, my experience with snow landscape shots is that they generally contain little color unless they are taken early or late in the day, so I converted all to black & whites.  Second, by ramping up the contrast slightly, the shots can take on the appearance of pencil drawings.  This is particularly apparent in the texture of the trunks of the trees in the shot above.  The shot lacks balance, but I wanted to incorporate the curving trunk of the tree in the background, which is featured in the next shot.

I actually liked the grass at the base of this tree.  

In some ways falling snow serves a similar function to fog--it creates depth between the foreground subject and the background and reduces some of the background distractions.  That component didn't work as well in the next shot because the background trees were not sufficiently obscured by the falling snow.  Still, I found the texture of the bark interesting.

The next pics are from the afternoon shoot, when the trees were more fully plastered with snow.  The result was a paler effect.

These shots still retain the pencil-drawing effect.  That effect doesn't come through as well with evergreen trees, even when heavily laden with snow.  

In all of these shots the cloud-covered sky was gray, as any attempt to lighten it up resulted in making the trees look overexposed.

The last photo is of a split rail fence that I have shot numerous times--with snow and without.    Because of the nature of the background, it seems that the best shots have been from a low angle, perhaps two feet off the ground, which meant in this case shooting while kneeling in the, by then, six inches of snow.  I also decided after some experimentation that the composition worked best when the fence was cropped so that it ran off the edges of the image.

John