Happy April Fools Day! It’s Spring. No it’s winter. Maybe not. Yea it’s that time of the year that isn’t really spring but isn’t really winter either. It’s what we like to call Montana Spring. As result we often get rather weird storms coming through which yields rain in the valley and snow in the mountains. Hey either way that means water accumulation which is a good thing. Well one of things that I really like doing this time of year is photographing the fresh snow that falls on the pine bows. Usually it only occurs after a storm and it usually melts off right away. Thus it becomes something of a race to get their in time.
There are a number of ways to work with snow and believe me I don’t know them all. But one thing to always look for are the areas that form a natural contrast. In this case it’s the very tops of the pines tree being hit by light because they are just a little bit taller then the others. With the combination of the non lit trees there forms natural depth that can be exploited by dialing in exposure compensation, in this case -1 and 1/3. Using the D4 and 70-300 VR, the goal isn’t to try and capture everything but just the lit spots.