New-year snow

There’s been snow on the ground since before Christmas, and throughout the first week of the year. Not an awful lot, but enough to be inconvenient. We’re going through a bit of a cold snap, so the snow shows no sign of turning to slush.

Jen and I managed to take a few walks around the lanes. The first time, we were caught out, ending up walking through something of a blizzard. I managed to take a few photos of falling snow. But my favourite photo came before the blizzard: a nice one across the snowy fields of the beech stand next to Old Town Mill. Someone is building a few new houses next to the mill, which will mar my favourite iconic view, so this time I kept the mill out of shot, concentrating on the silhouetted trees on the skyline. Unfortunately, they weren’t the only prominent features on the skyline: a pile of plastic-wrapped hay bales very much got in the way.

There’s a general rule of thumb in portrait photography that it’s acceptable to remove facial blemishes ‘in post’, provided those blemishes are temporary, and likely to be gone from your subject’s fizzog within three weeks. Other than cropping and removing sensor spots, I tend not to remove stuff in post from my landscape shots, but, on this occasion, the unsightly temporary blemishes were totally ruining the image and had to go.

I really liked the resultant photo. I’ve photographed the same stand of trees hundreds of times, but this time I think I really caught their ‘character’—perhaps because they weren’t contending for attention with hay bales and an iconic mill.

New-year snow
New-year snow

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