Snow Days (and Nights)
There was a time when Southwestern Ohio would receive a LOT of snow during the Winter, but unfortunately due to climate change, good dumpings of snow during the Winter are few and far between anymore. The times that I really get to utilize the 4wd and Nokian tires on my Pathfinder in a year I can usually count on one hand anymore.
January 28th, 1978 - The “Blizzard of '1978” - Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer Newspaper Photograph - Public Domain
That’s why I was stoked when it started snowing the late afternoon of Friday, 2/16. I knew that at the rate it was coming down that we were going to get a good accumulation, and I was not disappointed the next day.
I set my alarm for 3am to get out and shoot some night photography in the snow for my “Light at the Edge” project. You may have read before in an earlier post that I have a show coming up in May at Sinclair College, and I really wanted to add some moody night time snow shots to the ongoing series. It’s still up in the air as to whether I’m going to include any of these new images in the show or not, but I’m happy with the work I did that early morning.
I was home by 6:30am to grab some breakfast and chat with Renee, then off before sunrise to Huffman Prairie and Seibenthaler Fen for the Great Backyard Bird Count. In addition to my bird gear, I packed the Konica C35 Automatic loaded with a roll of Kodak Ultramax 400 film. I thought this would make a light, easy to carry camera that would enable me to get some good snowy images, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The early morning light was changing rapidly, which combined with the sticky snow made for some interesting scenes. If you read my initial review on the C35 Auto you’ll remember that I stated that it was fully automatic, with no way of adjusting the speed or aperture, and no +/- exposure compensation. Shooting in snow has its own set of challenges due to the fact that every camera’s light meter wants to set the snow as 18% neutral grey, and therefor underexpose the scene. To avoid that I tricked the camera by telling it that it had 100 speed film instead of 400 in it by setting the film speed dial to 100. This allowed for it to get proper exposures in the bright white snow.
Here are a few shots from the morning.
After those two locations, I came home to have lunch and record my bird count info. Unfortunately I didn’t get any great bird shots for the day, but that’s OK.
I was just happy to be outside playing around in the snow.
Thanks for reading,
Jeremy
