Fresh Snow

From my last post you can assume any news on the snow front would elicit excitement. A couple of days after the last post we got a scattering of light snow whic continued to fall throughout the morning.

I grabbed the camera (Fuji GFX 50sii with the workhorse Zuiko 135mm f2.8), the dog and headed up to Pine Street Woods for the usual morning walk. Four hundred feet higher and you can be assured of a little more snow though not much more today.

There is something incomparable to walking through a forest when the snow is falling. It renders the air apparent. The sifting granules have a calming effect to the scene. The snow graces everything if touches like some sacred benediction.

Mollie and I struck out across the Meadow trail towards the others called, Momentum, then Pine Cone to Owl and back to the truck. Not a long walk measured in miles but the camera slows the journey in a way that creates its own narrative.

At the edge of the meadow stand some young larch that glowed yellow, later orange, a few weeks earlier until they shed their needles. Now they were adorned in their new ghostly garb.

Further on as I made the next couple of compositions Mollie sat quietly under a small douglas fir and looked out across the forest below. Attentive to the sounds but still and silent. She becomes zen dog when I am photographing. She knows this is part of the process and sits contently under the shelter of the tree and taking in all she can sense of her surroundings.

There is another trail called Crooked Tree that ends in a kind of viewpoint. We detoured to the rocky point and Mollie could test the edges of my courage stepping out to the icy edges of the glacier smoothed boulders. Here are a couple of views of the eponymous tree.

In the dark woods of the Owl trail Mollie patiently waited this time under a leaning tree trunk while she surveyed the woods and I took some pictures.

Photographic Notes

As noted above these were taken with my Fuji GFX 50s ii digital camera using the Olympus (Zuiko) 135mm f2.8 lens. I used the Classic Chrome film simulation and these are the JPEGs from the camera. (No RAW editing.)

These were shot handheld at either ISO 100 or 400. I chose ISO 100 to slow the shutter down to get the falling snow captured. The GFX has good in-body image stabilization (IBIS) so I can shoot down to perhaps 1/15 of a second if I am careful. The lens was often wide open or no more than 2 stops down. This helps control depth of field as well as keeping the shutter speeds fast enough for handheld. I also employed another trick when the light demanded it. That is to shoot one stop underexposed. I know I can recover that sacrificed stop in post.

In post, I used Affinity Photo and made small adjustments for exposure (to restore the intentional underexposure), white point, brightness, and contrast. Some images have a small vignette added. Finally I shifted the color temperature a very slight amount towards warm as I found the film simulation rendered an unrealistic cooler tone to the images.