Taking only photographs – leaving only footprints
It seems a world away, but this was taken in England last winter. I had walked through the snow from my parents house to Dunham Park where I had two or three winter scenes in mind for a photograph. As a child I always liked coming to this park to look down the avenues of trees. It was quite surreal to see the park like this; I can’t ever remember seeing snow at Dunham Massey before.
It seems like a long time since we have had snow like this, but it was only a couple of months ago that I was walking around Dunham Massey with my camera. Again this photograph is all about the shape, pattern and texture that the fallen snow creates on the branches of this tree. At the time it wasn’t actually snowing, but the wind was making snow fall from the branches onto my camera. I didn’t hang around long under this particular tree for fear of getting a load of snow on my camera, or worse down the back of my neck!
This was one of my recent planned photographs. Firstly in the summer I took the photo, but obviously without the snow. At the time I was happy with it, but looking at what I captured more recently the above is much better in my opinion. The snow covered version took two attempts because the first time I walked to Dunham Massey there was a lot of snow, but the sun was coming through the trees, which cast huge shadows all across the building and made for a very distracting final image. So a couple of weeks ago, when more snow came, I was back there with my camera. I knew that where I needed to stand was on a very steep slope down towards the stream and so I took my tripod to give both myself and the camera some extra support.
Spending an afternoon walking around Dunham park looking for good snow scenes was very enjoyable, but I wanted to try to capture some close-up detail photographs. This was the best I came away with in the end. Without the patches of blue sky in the background it would be a awful photograph, but I like how heavy the snow seems on the very thin branches. It seems that if there were to be a slight wind, my camera’s lens would probably fill with snow, as it would come crashing down on me!