There’s nothing like hiking and landscape photography in fresh spring snow in the mountains. Except perhaps while it’s snowing – as long as that’s done safely, of course. And how about while it’s simultaneously snowing and the sun is shining brightly? These photographs were made during such a day.
It was a beautiful sunny late-March day in the Arapaho National Forest, below Loveland Pass in north-central Colorado. The sun was shining brightly off to the south, casting shadows on the snow under the fir trees. The late-morning light was a little contrasty for photography. So I had not been making images as I made my way through the deep snow in this area. Then, while passing this row of fir trees below Mount Sniktou’s peak, a snow squall passed and began dropping quite heavy, wet snow. The light became fascinating: bright directional sunlight, shadows under the trees, with low cloud simultaneously bouncing fill light back into the forest trees.
I dropped my backpack in a snow drift, got out a camera and lens, and I began making images. While it was a bit of a challenge to keep the front element of my lens dry in the dense wet snow, the resulting photographs were well worth the effort. For a brief time, the light was perfect and the heavy falling snow caused wonderful texture across the view.
The light only lasted for several minutes. The series shown here were my favorites of the outing.
Since the light was still pretty contrasty while I photographed, it was actually difficult to differentiate my black-and-white captures from my color images at the time. Generally, I end up with a strong preference for which images end up as black-and-white finished photographs, and which end up as color. In this case, I ended up liking both versions of this spring snow quite a lot.
So directly below are the black-and-white photographs.
And here are the color photographs. Which do you prefer?
