Last week we had some snow in The Netherlands. This doesn’t happen that often, so the first morning with snow I ran out with my camera as soon as there was light. I was seriously worried that the snow would melt before my eyes as soon as the sun would rise.

The first picture I took is the one below, where it was still quite dark (taken with the Leica Tele-Elmarit 1:2.8/90mm). I managed with 1/90 seconds exposure, but I could only take pictures near the light post. I do like the effect of light reflecting in the ice on the branches though. But I realised it was too dark to get some decent landscape pictures, so went back home, and waited another hour.

For my second run into the snow I took my 35mm Summicron lens, as I wanted to capture snow-landscapes. I had hoped for a nice sun-rise with the snow, but unfortunately it was very clouded, grey, and snowing all the time. Which presented me with the challenge: how do I capture falling snow in my photo? For my first attempt I tried stopping down the aperture a bit for added sharpness. But I got the best result shooting wide open (f/2) and a short exposure (1/500 sec). And the dark background from the house definitely helps. It still not very obvious, I guess the snowflakes were pretty small.

The photo on top of this post left me with mixed feelings. It is almost too perfect, and therefore boring. But on the other hand I am kind of proud of it, as it looks like a postcard. To increase that effect I added some vignetting in Lightroom. For this photo I did stop down the aperture quite a lot (f/6.8), which resulted in the added sharpness of this picture.