For the second time this season, a winter storm moved through the region and we ended up with mostly rain. But it'll be here soon enough, which is just as good a time as any to extend an invitation for you to send me your favorite snow photos. I'll post some here sometime before the end of the year (2008's only a month away!) Send them to me the same way you did during the summer, as jpeg attachments to roadtrip@phillynews.com
So here's a preview of the snow we'll eventually see, from a trip I made up to southern Lehigh County and upper Bucks County after they received the area's first real snowfall during the week of Thanksgiving. My assignment for the newspaper that day was to shoot some early morning breaking news for philly.com, so I headed north on the turnpike until I hit snow.
That happened just south of Quakertown, where I exited the Northeast Extension, and quickly found commuters scraping windshields, and sent in my photo from my laptop in the Wawa parking lot (same place I shot Eric Dauter, at left).
Then I was able to devote myself to making pretty pictures of the snow falling on the still autumn-hued landscape.
A dozen photographers can see the same scene and photograph it in two dozen different ways. Beginning with the decision whether or not to even take the cameras outside in bad weather, as photographers we exercise an almost infinite amount of control over the pictures we take. Our choices range from where to stand and whether we kneel or climb on top of something; which lens to use; what color balance and ISO; fast or slow shutter speed; use a tripod or not; and which aperture. Even after all that, there are still tons of compositional choices.
For the photo above, I wanted to shoot something pretty, showing the falling snow with trees still full of autumn-colored foliage. So I used a longish lens - my 180mm f/2.8 - to compress the space, and a slow shutter speed - 1/60th second - to make the snowflakes appear as blurs. An ISO of 400 and shooting with an aperture of f/11 gave me some extra depth of field as well.
For another view, I used the same lens, but this one was shot wide open at f/2.8 with a higher shutter speed. That gave me a combination of small, sharp snowflakes and larger blurred ones - and threw the background out of focus.
