Spring Sugar Snow Storm

Spring Sugar Snow Storm

The Spring Storm turned out to be a severe Nor’easter along the Boston coastline.  It also dumped two feet of snow in NorthWest New York.  All the same, in the Sand Lake, NY area, this blizzard created great images of Nature’s beauty in a white blanket.  High winds pelted the forest’s bows with dense sugar snow. The bland brown springtime landscape of yesterday turned into something wonderfully magical.

I spent a little while debating if I wanted to venture out into this stuff after persuading myself that I owed it to myself to drive in ten inches of unplowed snow as a photographer. These blizzards do not come around too often, and I have to prove my support of  Yankee winters, especially after spending February in Florida.

After donning my cold-weather gear, I started out driving around the neighborhood in my Subaru cross-tech AWD.  There was little traffic when I headed out at 12 pm.  Familiar ho-hum scenery now looked like once-in-a-lifetime photographs of white on white.   Everything normal was now scrambled up. The blizzard provided new coats of every shade of white and grey to the skies, trees, fields, and homes.  It was adventurous and exciting.

Beyond Basics Gear Settings

I brought along two camera setups that fit in the MP1-V2 backpack on the passenger side seat.  My Nikon D5 had the 70-200 f/2.8 E on it, and my D850 had the wide-angle 16-35 f/4 was using.  Your camera meter is 128 grey, so your camera meter will underexpose white images, so you have to push your EV up one stop.  After doing this a few times, I went with another idea. I set my bracket mode to +2 shots over normal.  This brought my histogram on my 2nd image to expose to the right (ETTR).  This gave me one baseline shot with the contrast of the scene and then a 2 +1 stopover.  Since the camera was metering at 128 greys, I had one extra stop of exposure available.  The was no sun to deal with, so no blinkies. Polarizers are not needed, No sun.

In the Zone, then Nirvana.

It took me a while to put my full attention on my photography and not the weather, driving, or other vehicles.  Once in the zone, the photo opportunities to create in the blizzard complimented my technical and artistic skills.  I wasn’t thinking of what I needed to do; I was setting up, composing, creating, and clicking.  The hours flew by. I was glad that I had both camera setups. Landscape photography is about capturing a moment, and I’d missed many stories and moments with only the wrong lens.

Soon the plows were out in force, and drivers from work began commanding the main roadways.  I decided to take a chance and head over to a favorite secluded location on a lonely dirt back road.  The Suby and I had our Blizzard snow legs, and we managed that nasty road with ease.  The scenery location was untouched. It was splendid and awe-inspiring beyond words.

The Technical Layer

To read additional technical and location content, please click on the tabs below.