“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”

- Andrew Wyeth

Here in southern New England, winters are often cold and always dreary.  Gone are the pastel colors of spring, the warm temperatures and lush foliage of summer, and the brilliant colors of autumn.  What remains are, as Andrew Wyeth states, the bones of the landscape.  These bones aren’t always the most beautiful objects to photograph, but there are ways to keep shooting through the winter given the proper conditions, which for me is freshly fallen snow.

The images you see on this page were made over the New Year’s weekend going into 2010.  The  tree in the field was photographed  during a very windy snowstorm.  I’ve been trying to capture an image of this particular tree (or at least an image I like) for many years now, but the right conditions always seem to elude me.  There is nothing dramatic about the light in this image, but the snow on the field has removed the distractions of grass, leaves, fallen branches and the like, and the falling snow has made the tree a soft grey.  For how cold, snowy, and windy it was when I made the image, in its compositional simplicity I feel its a very peaceful scene.

The color image here was made a few days earlier than the one at the top of the page.  Snow had fallen during the evening and through the following day, and with no wind coinciding with this snowfall (an unusual occurrence with a southern New England snow), the trees’ branches held a deep coating of snow on them.  Knowing how rare this was, I persuaded my wife and children to go for a hike with me at a local park.   At dusk as we were completing our hike I came across this scene.

Certainly busier than the scene at the top of this page, this image has a similar peaceful quality to it.  The blue of the cloudy dusk helps to hold the scene together and promote the “cold” feeling that I was looking for.  If this image were made earlier, the scene would have been rendered much brighter, but dull grey, which would have caused the elements in the scene to merge together into an incohesive mess.  As I’ve said in a previous post, simplicity is both an important theme and technique in my photography, and I think these images help to reaffirm that.

Being alone outside in a winter landscape dressed in fresh, undisturbed snow is a relatively rare but interesting experience.  Snow has a way of muffling extraneous sounds, so I find a greater level of peace and quiet in the woods on a winter’s day.  I can’t say that I physically enjoy winter shooting as much as warmer-weather shooting, but given the right conditions shooting in winter can make an otherwise dull winter’s day much less dreary.  Plus, it gives me something to do while waiting for spring to arrive.

© 2009 James A. Fraser