Snowscape in both color and black & white

Always attracted to the sensuous shapes formed by snow on the landscape, I was lucky today in that I could incorporate them into a photo of scenery, instead of shooting them alone.  To emphasize the curves, I stayed at a short distance and zoomed in more than I usually do for landscape photographs. 

Like many winter scenes, this I rendered this one in both color and black and white.  I'm unsure which I like better, so I included both of them here.

Oh, the strange shapes you'll see

Snowstorms earlier in the week coated the windward side of every tree.  Then the sun and mild temperatures would melt the snow, which re-froze at night, creating some interesting ice formations like the one above.

This caught my eye as I was snowshoeing up the mountainside, and I was more than willing to take a rest to catch my breath and fire off a dozen or more photos.  This one is my favorite, because of the bokeh pine that creates great contrast with the ice.

Panorama gif file

By combining eight images into a single animated gif file, I found a new way to make a landscape panorama. 

Click the image, if it's not animating for you.

Sensuous Snow Shapes

A day or two after a new snowfall, sun and gravity work their magic on the landscape, creating some fantastic shapes in the snow.

I brought the black slider up in Photoshop levels to improve the contrast of this photo.

Black and white winterscape

Hiking to the top of Huntsmans Ridge, these snow-covered trees were irresistible.  Though it looks like I was using a polarizing filter, all I had was a UV filter on the lens.  The sky was just that blue.  I converted to black and white using the Channel Mixer in Photoshop. 

This was one of my favorite photos of the day, and I had a lot of good ones.  Of over five hundred photos shot, I posted only ten to my flickr pages.  One of the many advantages of digital is the ability to compose the same scene many different ways, and choose the best once you get home and upload the photos to your computer.

I cropped up from the bottom on this photograph, mostly to improve the balance (rule of thirds), but also to remove some unnecessary foreground.

Frosty plant on a frosty morning

The frozen water drops and delicate frost on this plant caught my eye as I walked through the snow to capture a winter landscape (winterscape) one chilly Colorado morning.