LET IT SNOW! The Storm of the decade!

Alina and I walking in of a winter wonderland. Here we did our shopping before the snow got really heavy. In less then a week, it went from temps in the 50s and looking like we are having no winter, to the hardest winter and deep freeze in years.


The first thing I do when there is snow is go out and take night shots, and long exposures. This tree was a 20sec exposure at iso100 or so. Focusing can be difficult if your using a digital SLR. My best advice to set your focus quick and easy is to use a pocket laser pointer. The red dot will give the camera a point. Make sure one of your AF area points is focused on the dot and you should be able to focus in on things at a distance in darkness where otherwise use auto focus would be impossible and manual focus just as impossible because it's too dark. Another way is to use a flash but often these light pulses are not bright enough to focus the camera. Expensive flash units have IR or light focus systems built into them. If they do work for you, just get the right range and then switch your lens over to Manual focus. Then the camera will stay focused until you put it back on so you can take several shots and find the best exposure time. Be sure and turn off the flash unit or close your pop up flash before you take the shot if you want it to be a true night exposure. I find a small pocket laser-pointer an easy system to focus my SLRs and DSLRs in the dark. Some cameras have IR focusing systems that make it even more easy, especially compact cameras.

Every nightshot needs good white ballence. Sometimes however, I just let the camera select for me or set it for daylight. This produces off colors but also can show interesting effects and add color and feel to pictures. White ballence setting here should have been twards the 60hz range. The "light blub" setting. Your digital camera will show. If you shoot film, you won't have much choice in the matter unless you go to speical mesures. So this winter Cathedreal I just captured and left exactly how I shot it. However, since it was shot in RAW, like all images shot in RAW, white ballence is not fixed. You can adjust it with a simple mouse movement into the right colors. Sometimes however, effects like this can be cool so I don't change them. It's this color because of the color of the light it is picking up on. Street and home lights.
Ice cycles get longer and hard enough to become dangerous! These are more then 3ft long.
This is how it started..
Like the calm before the storm, I went out because it was nearly 60F in Decmeber! I took quite a few shots one day. Not knowing yet that the biggest winter storm in over five years here and 40 years in Oregon was about to hit!

Grass was growing and dew formed making for springtime shots. Just a week after this picture was taken, this grass was barried in snow and it was about 15F.

Moss before the snow was green as spring.

A new flash lets me take better macro shots. This female Sheetweb spider made it inside before the cold weather. Prolonged below freezeing weather kills spiders and insects. If there are a number of hot winters, many species survive through the winter well.

This was the most amazing, taken just before the snow storm, this maple bug feeds on a blade of grass. You can tell from it's long mouthparts extending. Maple bugs overwinter communally. They often live under houses but pose no threat to homes.

Then the snow came.


A shot from one of my favorate lookout points as the storm started with severe cold and a light dusting of snow in low areas. Your looking at Washington state and the town of Dallsport.

Ice cicles formed in the coldest of times. These were probubly created by my dryer. Melting in only one area when it was very cold all day and night.

Then the snow came. This was a few days in, we got a total of about 2 and a half feet solid. That is not as much as we got in 2004, but very close. The news in Portland where they got over a foot (uncommon there) said this was the largest storm since the 1960s. Most notably the coldest. My digital thermomiter got as low as 6 degrees.

BLIZZARD DAY!


Snow piles over 6ft high in parking lots.

I hiked over a mile in the snow just to capture these shots of MillCreek. In The Dalles, 2 feet of snow seems to come every few years. However, this cold made for some awesome creek shots and the coldest photo-walk I've ever done. I protected my digital SLR with a special camera sack that fits over the entire camera. You can operate the controls in rain, snow, cold and all. It works well but like everything in photography costs too much!


Another shot, be sure and click on this image to see a large image. Use your <-- explorer's back arrow to return to my site. Over a foot accumulated in less then a couple of days on this picknick bench. People cleaned them off, but it kept pileing up. When I got here after my long hike, I bought a cup of coffiee and sat at the bench outside. Even though it was only about 12 degrees, I was hot, and too covered in snow to stay inside the store so I waited for my cab out here.

And here we have a nightshot, one of nearly 100 shots I took at night. These exposures range from 5 to 30 sec. The art of taking nightshots has been awesome this year and is really fun when there is snow. I need to go through allot more of my pictures to find more of the better ones. One peace of advice I have to give to photographers.. don't take too many pictures but take enough. Finding that ballence is difficult in the digital age.
Another area of millcreek. The snow and nice makes this look like somewhere up in the mountains. It was a fun hike. I had to use garbage bags to keep my feet warm and dry. Took a cab home, it was a long hike! With my dissability (chorinc pancreititus) I was also in allot of pain to take these pictures. I just did it because I love it. And am proud of the shots I got because I decided to make this difficult and dangerous hike. I stated in constant contact with Alina (My feioncee) with a 2 way very long range VHF radio cliped on my backpack.

Some ice cycles were incredible but I am a bit afraid of showing them because in doing so I put other people's houses on the internet. As a photographer, I should not do that. So I will have to go through my pics and see if I can find some more that are generic enough to post once cropped.
More millcreek views.
As I left, this was the view looking back. Public and private people were getting arround every way possible. This guy was right in thinking his tracktor was a better idea then his car!

This kind of ice can be dangerous when it thaws out. Not just to hit people, but ice cycles can break windows.


Another shot from one of my favorate lookout points here. In walking distance, I was able to shoot the Washinton state view so often shown in my website. Now with well over a foot of snow on the ground this was a cold but beautiful night. This was a nighttime exposure set for about 20sec. I finally got the colors right when I set my white ballence for 60Hz or so. Your going to want to manually set your white ballence when doing nightshots.



A nearby house really was in the Christmas sprit. Against this dark background, it can be seen how hard it was snowing. It snowed like this, and harder, for days.


Dark as night but yet brighter then day. Nighttime exposures are fun and one of my favorates. You never really know how it will turn out.
Taken completely late at night, things get bright the longer your exposure. The camera has to be absolutly still. I have many other shots, some showing litghts from passing cars I plan to add to this article. I need to process more pics for that.
It was so cold that this long exposure captured my breath. I had to learn how to hold it for a while when taking long exposures. It was very bright however, so most of them did not have to be very long in this environment.
The key to captureing snowflakes in a picture is to use your flash unless your background is sufficiantly dark to show snow. Set your flash to a low setting and see snowflakes!