Photography in the snow is always a challenge for me. Living in the American south, it isn’t a problem I get a lot of opportunity to work on. It doesn’t help that I really only get to get out with my camera on very specific time. The weather might be terrible and the light might be poorly suited to the kind of work I am in the mental space for. The dirty secret of my rock wall abstracts is that that subject was selected in part due to the fact that westward facing vertical rock faces will almost always be in the shade of under diffuse light when I get the opportunity to get out with my camera.
So, I deal with the light I’m given. It is almost always in the morning or mid-day and on sunny days the environment I’m in means that I will be dealing with a lot of harsh shadows. I’d wager one in three of the photos I discard after any outing is due to the harsh shadows not working with the image.
I was taught that you need to think of shadows as objects in the frame. When you are working with extremely busy scenes like the one above, adding in really pronounced shadows makes it nearly impossible to compose a coherent image. This is when I begin to think about working with abstraction. If the shadow is going to be an object, let it be a tangible and real in the frame as any other subject matter.
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