Up.
Weather forecast: Snow.
I felt giddy with excitement when I saw it. I immediately took a day off and planned a hike up a hill. I never hiked up a hill in deep-ish snow before. I therefore decided to take it easy. It takes me less than an to do it in dry weather.
It wasn’t snowing in the valleys in the morning. I caught the first glimpses of the snow on the ground when I was driving towards the starting point. As the road was guiding me higher and higher, the conditions became snowier and snowier. The winter tires on my car were doing their job well, and I soon made it to the starting point.
When I got out of the car I was greeted by windy and snowy conditions. I was surprised at how much snow there was and delighted to find pristine snow. There were no shoeprints visible. I started walking. It soon became clear it would take me longer to reach the top, Mainly because there was up to 30cm of snow. It also made walking much more tiring than usual. But at least I wasn’t hot because the cold wind was blowing strongly.
The branches and the younger trees we slumping under the weight of the snow. They were forming tunnels in places. The wind was blowing the show around forming drifts. And it made trees look almost alien. Tree trunks had a lot of snow clinging to them in an interesting triangular way.
There’s little color. Everything looks black and white. The feeling is amplified when clouds engulf the landscape. I was enjoying the whole occasion very much.
When I reached the top par of the hill, I started looking around for photos. I soon realized it’s quite hard to photograph snow drifts and still maintain the softness they have. Then I started photographing tree trunks. Completely head-on at first.
But then I started using my widest lens, I laid on the ground and pointed my camera up. This was one of the photos I took.
I was using the feature some tree species have – crown shyness. It means that the trees don’t touch each other and that forms a sort of channels between them and that is also visible on the photo. It makes a nice photo combined with the snow sticking to the tree trunks.
