When we think of doing photography in winter we usually bring to mind beautiful snowy scenes, wonderful frost covered landscapes or mysterious foggy woodlands.
Yet we are seldom presented with these ideal weather conditions.
Often, winters can bring a lot of rain, wind and overall drab conditions.
Gone are the amazing colours of autumn and replacing them are short days and dark cloudy skies.
It can be hard to find interesting compositions in this type of winter weather, yet there is something about winter photography that I love.
I have always been drawn to winter trees and the beautiful lacy patterns which they make when viewed against a moody sky.
I recently took a photography walk to capture some tree images.
Images shot on iPhone with minimum edits using Snapseed
Winter also provides opportunities for capturing dramatic colours in the evening sky or finding images of dark moody clouds.
In the images below I stopped at a lake just after sunset and enjoyed watching the changing colours of the sky as it moved from day to night.
In these images I deliberately left the shadows dark to accentuate the sky.
While snow, frost and fog provide great opportunities to get out and make some images, winter weather is usually less dramatic so it is important to find ways to make the most of this (often long) season.
Without travelling too far we can find drama around us in the sky, in trees, in woodlands, and by the sea if we are lucky enough to be able to do winter coastal photography.
We can capture wide vistas that show off dramatic, colourful skies, or move closer to our subject and pick out smaller details such as parts of trees, individual trees in a woodland or random splashes of colour in an otherwise drab environment.
We can allow winter to prevent us from doing photography, or we can get out with our camera and find out what photo opportunities winter has to offer.
How do you do winter photography? Share your ideas below.
You might also like a previous post I wrote called Why I Think Trees Make a Great Photography Subject.
Comments