Just when I thought Winter was finally over, Mother Nature decided to play an April Fool’s prank a few weeks early. Two weeks ago, we were experiencing temperatures in the 70s and low 80s. “Ahhh, Spring has finally arrived,” I thought to myself. But, that ended last week when temperatures dropped into the 40s and low 50s. Still not too bad, but I much preferred the previous week’s weather. Then, on Friday, the snow moved in.
Fortunately, the previous week’s warm weather kept the roads from freezing over, but I decided to take my time as I drove home. Driving along the highway, I noticed several areas that looked amazing and would, I thought, make for some great photographs: stands of cypress trees partially covered with snow and illuminated by the dim light of the evening’s overcast sky, snow covered branches that created amazing abstract patterns, and more. My world had turned into a beautiful winter wonderland in just a couple of hours.
I wanted so badly to stop and photograph the scenes I passed by. But, I was not dressed properly to be outside for more than a few seconds, I didn’t have my camera equipment, and, most importantly, there was nowhere for me to pull off the road and photograph safely. I had no choice but to continue on.
Turning onto the street that runs in front of my house, I inched along looking for any similar scenes to those I had noticed earlier, but nothing was catching my eye. . .until I pulled up in front of my house and saw this group of trees in my yard. The snow had turned them into a winter forest. I couldn’t park my truck fast enough.
The day was turning to night, and the heavily overcast sky was speeding that process along. I ran inside, quickly changed clothes, grabbed my gear, and ran back out to the street. I found a good shooting location and began setting up my camera and tripod.
That’s when I realized just how much snow was coming down and how hard the wind was blowing. In my haste to get outside, I had not grabbed a pair of gloves. It was only one or two minutes before my hands began to go numb, so I captured a few images and hurriedly headed back inside. Reviewing the images in Lightroom, I liked this one the best.
Processing the file, the first thing I did was crop the image to a 4:3 aspect ratio to eliminate a lot of dead space on the right edge of the frame that didn’t add anything to the image and was actually quite distracting. Next, I spent time working on the image’s contrast. I wanted the large tree on the right to stand out from the snow while the other trees appeared to fade out as one looked deeper into the scene, which would be expected in a heavy snowfall.
I also wanted the final image to reflect the late evening light. Using the saturation and luminance sliders, I adjusted the picture’s blue and purple tones to add just a bit of these colors to the image. At this time of day and in weather conditions like this, the light will often have a slight bluish cast to it, and I thought it fit perfectly with this snowy winter scene. But, it was important to not introduce too much blue, or it would definitely not look right. Finally, I reduced the overall exposure slightly to provide a sense of a late winter evening.
The final step in processing was to sharpen the image in Photoshop. I tried to use Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI software to do this, but it did not work as well as I had hoped. First, it applied sharpening to the entire image, which really didn’t suit this particular scene. Second, it created strange artifacts with the streaks of snow. The result was not to my liking at all.
The best way to sharpen the image in this case was to do it manually. Using an additional layer, a mask, and Photoshop’s high pass filter, I was able to sharpen only the small snow-covered branches in the foreground, which I reasoned would appear to be sharper than the background trees because the branches were closer to the camera. The snowfall would naturally soften the background trees, so sharpening those would not look right given the conditions. I then saved this final image.
When the snowfall ended, we had probably gotten in the neighborhood of two to three inches of snow. The next day, the sky was clear and sunny, and the temperature had warmed into the upper 30s. By the end of the day, nearly all the snow was gone.
The snow was certainly beautiful while it lasted, and I’m glad I was able to get a nice picture out of it. But, I hope that was Winter’s last hoorah for a while. I’m ready for Spring.