Revisiting an Old Location After a Snowstorm
Looking back through many of my images from the first half of this year I stumbled upon a series of images from an outing just after a snowstorm. Remembering that I had shot video as well as photos that day I went back and found I had a whole YouTube video shot that I never edited!
While the images aren’t the best ones from my first Winter in New Hampshire, the story of revisiting a location I had previously photographed in the Fall made for what I find to be an interesting story.
After my success in Swasey Park at the end of Fall I had been eagerly awaiting the right weather conditions to revisit the location and try to recapture that same level of inspiration I had felt that day where I capture the last of the fall colors.
You can see those images and the accompanying video here
Upon arriving at the park things just didn’t seem to go my way, I had neglected to bring a second single memory card, and as such had to keep switching the card back and forth between the camera I was using to record video and the camera I had set up for shooting stills. This inconvenience took away from my ability to feel present in the image taking process. In my opinion the purpose of equipment is to do it’s job so well that one doesn’t have to even think about it, it should just work. So having my gear require additional attention just to perform the most basic of functions was extraordinarily frustrating. As such I ended up with only a handful of usable photos, though I was able to at least record some pleasing video.
In my roaming through the park searching for imagery I found a fascinating scene: a pair of trees growing out of a single stump, with a smaller tree sprouting out of the space in between. I captured this phenomenon two different ways, as I was unsure which composition would be more effective. The first image shows the trees with a small amount of space on either side to give a greater feeling of scale, while the second image cuts out everything except the three trees. I enjoy both of these images, but can’t choose which is the better image as they both seem to convey a different feeling.
As I made my way out from under the cover of the trees and approached the frozen lake I saw the graffiti and icicles on the side of this rock. I was fascinated by the pop of color in what was essentially a monochromatic landscape and sought to capture it in a photograph. Unfortunately I came across the same problem that so often occurs for me with landscape and street photography; the image simply fails to capture the scene as I perceived it in the moment.
This final image is probably my favorite of the outing, as it captured so well my experience with Winter in the North-East. The image is dominated by a nearly featureless swath of grey in the sky and snow. The lake is unrecognizable as a body of water, and the sky could just as easily be a field of snow as well. The leafless woodland on the right and in the background across the ice frame the only color in the scene, which is the faded neutral tones of the lakefront homes. Winter brings what feels like an unescapable and oppressive layer of snow that completely takes over everything, and this image captured that sensation.
