Winter tired

Roots, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

There are so many ways of looking at winter. Now I'm already tired of it, after only a few days of snow. It was the snowstorm from yesterday which did it - too much snow at once, and I had to shovel the snow into piles away from the walkway and around the car. Today I need to do the same again.

A little snow is a beautiful thing, though. And of course, I'll probably change my mind when the first sunny winter day appears. Then it will be all different, not like now when it is clouded and snowing.

It seems that you also need to develop the photography skills further. I didn't remember to turn up the exposure for some of the photos from yesterday, making the snow look gray instead of white. Of course, you can do that in post-processing, but it does not help in all situations. And I would like to get it right at once.

So, what I'll do is modify my custom settings a bit on the LX3, putting perhaps + 2/3 EV exposure compensation as default. That should help somewhat.

Update: After thinking about this for a bit, I realized that it is not so simple. For example, in the photo here, there are many dark elements combined with the white snow. This is more or less how I wanted the photo to look like, but I could also tried to get more of the snow shades to appear. So, clipping the highlights may be a problem, and getting it right is more a question of how you are metering the exposure than on the EV compensation. In any case, what is sure is that I have to be much more careful about the exposure that during summer and autumn.

But snow is not only a problem. It also simplifies the scenery, covering a lot of complexity away from view. In that sense there are new apporturnities for photography, especially towards more abstract compositions. Have to see if this direction is fruitful.

Update 2: Yesterday the latest weather reports said that we would get about 10 cm of snow here in the Helsinki region. I thought the this is not right, as on our yard there was already 10-30 cm of snow. Now the reports say that we got 30 cm of snow, and there will by 10 cm more today. So there. No wonder I'm a bit tired of the shoveling.