Winter Sketches: The Sea of Snow

Last Updated on August 1, 2016 by Patrick

You can never have too much snow in winter. Even when it snows a lot, winter doesn’t come with a flood of snow such as a river coming out of its bed.

But you can never have enough these days, and you have to travel to the mountains to get it. Folks who are born in winter know what I’m talking about.

But when you’re in a sea of snow photographing, what do you do with all the snow, actually? Where’s your anchor point? Where do you hang your eyes? Where to look?

But when the Sun is low in the sky, the Light that spreads It seems as if it were July or August, in the evening, around 7 or 8 o’clock. It is a mild, warm light, during the entire short day of winter, although the temperature outside is not warm at all. The sea of snow covers almost everything leaving the photographer with only a few plants, a few wee trees at the horizon just to have the feeling of familiarity of space and to anchor one’s eyes somewhere in the natural composition.

So the funny thing is you have a summer’s evening all day in winter, when the sky is at least partly cloudy so it can reveal some sun and especially when the sky is completely clear.

In photography, as well as in any visual art, actually, there is the notion of negative space, such as I encountered recently. That is why I thought of a sea of snow, of too much snow, and what to do with it, what and how to compose. It was fairly simple especially when there is texture, there are wrinkles in the snow and the sun that casts interesting highlights upon them.

So I have character in this negative space, I have a story overall. It’s not just some snow comprising the most part of the picture, but a sea of snow depicting how much we all enjoy it in winter, and how much I miss it where I live.