I love snow. While I realise that many people are inconvenienced by it, and curse the white powder from the high heavens every time we get a heavy shower, I can't help myself. I love the way it makes everything take on a sheen of magical white beauty. Corny, I know, but anyway. We had our first real snow of the winter here last night, and while it is mild compared to what is happening in the UK at the moment, it was still a nice surprise. Anyway, never one to miss a photographic opportunity I grabbed a camera (actually a few cameras) and started shooting...
These were mostly taken with my D700 and 28-300 lens. I do confess to taking most of them from the comfort of indoors, although I headed out once the shower eased up, but more on that in a minute.
There was a lovely scene on the mountains behind where I live but I couldn't get close enough, then it hit me - use the crop mode on your camera. I had never tried the DX crop mode before, and it worked perfectly. Sure, I could have done it in Lightroom or Photoshop after the fact, but it is nice to be able to see what you're going to get through the lens. Here is the result....
It was still snowing pretty heavily at that stage, so it's a bit fuzzy, but still. Pretty good considering the conditions and that it's miles away!
Once it eased up a bit I headed out. It was actually melting pretty fast, and it was very wet, and somewhat unpleasant, so I didn't stay for long. I brought my Fuji X100 and my Sony Nex 7. Why both? Well, I wanted to go lightly, so hence bringing the smaller cameras, plus I wanted the extra zoom the lens on my sony gave me (a 30mm vs 23mm). If you can guess which is which (without looking at the EXIF data I'll be impressed!
Funny story on that last shot. I had accidentally knocked the ISO up to 16000. Yep, 16,000 not 1600. Amazingly enough it came out fine. A little bit of noise reduction on the raw file and a pinch of grain and no one's any the wiser!
For those wondering, I post processed everything in Lightroom using a combination of my own "steely blue" preset look, and also some of the VScO Presets (which are awesome)