Winter comes round at last

Yesterday I was thinking about the winter we've had around here, and how it hasn't been much of a winter at all, really.  I knew that there was the possibility that it would snow later that day, but the forecast says that a lot more than it actually happens, and it had been seeming very much like spring had arrived early this year and was here to stay.

And then the snow showers actually happened, after dark when it wasn't so noticeable, and by about one in the morning the tree branches were heaped with snow, and it was falling not as powder or as simple flakes but as great glops of snow that stuck to everything, and suddenly it was really winter after all.  So I wandered outside with my camera and tripod and spent about an hour trying to capture the look of a snowy wood at night.  Between the city lights reflecting off the clouds and the streetlight glare and power lines and houses and cars, most of the photos ended up looking like a snowy suburb in late afternoon, but a few came out all right.

This morning I drove out to a local nature preserve (the same one I mentioned in December 2010), this time with functional batteries, and got lots of pictures of trees with snow on them.  With any luck some will be helpful as references for the drawing I mentioned in that earlier post, which I never did get around to doing, having continually put it off in favor of other projects.

Snow

When Saturday morning dawned with two inches of snow on the ground, I set out for a local nature preserve with camera in hand.  (All right, it wasn't exactly dawn; it was rather closer to noon.  But you get the idea.)

I’ve always liked taking pictures in the woods with fresh snow on the ground, and the first week of December is unusually early for snow accumulations in this part of the country.  The sky was completely overcast, and there was almost no wind at all, and it was a wet, clumpy snow, so the tree branches and even some of the trunks were still covered, creating a landscape of grey lines on white.

I would include a photo, only I didn’t take any.  As soon as I got out of my car at the park I spotted a pair of evergreens flanking the trail that led to the nature center, their boughs laden with snow.  Remembering that I had wanted some reference shots of just such a scene for a drawing, I pulled out my camera and turned it on, only to find that the batteries, which I had fully charged right before leaving the house, were already dead.

Fortunately, I had brought along spares, also fully charged.  Unfortunately, these were also dead (apparently they're older than I thought and simply won't take a charge anymore).  On the bright side, since I was still in the parking lot when I discovered this, I was able to leave my camera and Gorillapod in the car, rather than carrying useless equipment a couple of miles through the snow.  And it was a perfect day for a walk in the woods, with or without a camera.