From my living room window you can look down on the top of a street lamp (because the flat is on the fourth floor) and on Saturday night it started snowing. It was amazing to sit and watch the wind blow the snow in all different directions. It is a very large window (almost floor to ceiling) and whilst sat there I saw this photographic composition in my mind. Grabbing the tripod and camera I was able to position the camera as close to the glass as possible and frame the picture as I saw it in my mind. Using a cable release to remotely trigger the shutter reduced camera shake. Once everything was set up I switched off all the lights in the room so this didn’t reflect off the glass or get into the camera. Then it was just a case of going back to watch the wind.
It was fantastic to be photographing snow and night in the warmth of my flat, sat on my sofa! Experimenting with exposure times and different apertures, I even set the camera to open up the shutter for 146 seconds (currently my longest exposure time on this camera). The above photograph was taken when I decided that the perfect settings were 3 seconds at f/5.6. With these settings I took over 70 photos and this was my favourite. The snow catches the light really well and because of the different wind speeds and directions it makes the whole thing look more like a firework than snow. Unlike the majority of photos on this website it hasn’t been cropped, or had major colour enhancement in Photoshop. The only thing I did was resize the image down to display on your monitor correctly.