Last weekend we had a proper snowfall in Northamptonshire. For me, it is the first snowy landscape that I have enjoyed with my camera for five years. The last snow I photographed was on Dartmoor when I was studying at Plymouth College of Art. In Devon, snow on the Moor always gets photographers very excited but access onto the Moor is precarious. So snow, literally on my doorstep, felt rather like an early birthday present (my next birthday’s in February).
The snow hadn’t been forecast and it certainly wasn’t expected to snow all day. By the early afternoon most of our neighbours in the village were enjoying some relief from the serious business of the COVID pandemic and were able to revel in a small window of surprise, fun and winter wonder.
Night fell and the temperature dropped. The snow on the ground froze hard and the children’s snowmen survived another day. The skies the next morning had pink hues pre sunrise and when the sky turned to blue there was a positively Tyrolean feeling to the day. I headed out early down the bridal path to the spinney behind our cottage and captured some more snowy landscape shots, the like of which we might not see again for a while. I was mindful to look carefully for extraneous things in my images like my own footprints, as well as my own shadow. And with the sun being lower in the sky in the northern hemisphere at this time of year, it was making the shadows longer.
The aesthetic for these images is much less of the high contrast that I envisaged for the foggy shots in my previous ‘Photosteps’ post. With snow, the exposure has to be carefully handled to produce clean white snow in the images - not grey, and not so bright that there is no detail in the light areas.
The two days offered completely different lighting and conditions – the first day was grey with low light as the snow fell, the following morning was joyful and bright. My intention was to celebrate an interlude among all the current restrictions with images that have an aesthetic which lifts the soul. With non-essential travel banned, I’m actually enjoying becoming more aware of the photo opportunities on my own patch.