Snowy Night

We're finally starting to get a little bit of snow up here in Chicago.  We went through a historic snow 'drought' of around 340 consecutive days without measurable snow.  They consider 1" or more 'measurable', so we've gotten some dustings here and there, but no real snow.
That all finally broke last week when we got a whopping 1.1" of snow at O'Hare...woot!
Since then, we've gotten a couple other days worth of snow, neither counting as measurable, but it looks pretty while it's falling. 

Yesterday, while sitting at my desk at work, I looked out the window and it was near white-out conditions.  Snow was falling like crazy and they were pretty big flakes.  This comes the day after it was 63 degrees and we got about 3" of rain.  So, while I was sitting at work, I was visualizing a picture I wanted to take...big fluffy flakes gently falling down with my wife standing out in the yard.  Unfortunately as the day went on, the flakes got smaller and the wind got stronger.  Temperatures continued to plunge and the snow was blowing around like crazy.

By the time I got home, the storm was all but over and there were these little, tiny flakes blowing around.  Nonetheless, I still wanted to try to get a snow picture.  I knew I wouldn't have the day light to get the picture I had in mind, but I thought I'd try a different technique I've seen done on-line and have tried once before myself.  I wanted to get a back lit picture - 41/52 "Silhouette" from April 2012 - but I also wanted to try to capture the snow that was still falling.  I've seen pictures of people in the rain with an umbrella, back lit by a strobe and the rain is highlighted, so I wanted to try something like that.

I took my light and camera outside to see if I could even capture the snow, since the flakes were so small, I didn't know if they would even be visible.  I set up a garbage can to act as us and hid the light behind it.  After snapping a few pictures, I thought the light worked well enough to highlight some of the snow, but it really didn't look all that awesome.

I went back inside and though I'd just be done for the night, since the snow wasn't all that great.  But, my wife is a good sport and said that if I wanted to try it, she would come out and we could do it anyway.  So, after a few more minutes of messing around with a second light, I took the gear back outside and set it up again. 

I put the back light in position, then put Paige where I wanted us to stand, then set up my camera.  I took a few test pictures to make sure everything was working correctly, set and locked the focus, then turned the timer on and hopped in the picture myself.  It took two shots with me actually in the picture to get the one we ended up using, so it was a pretty quick shoot.  Including set up time, we were outside for probably a total of 5 minutes.  Easy peasy.

I was pretty disappointed with the pictures when I looked at them on my camera and thought the shoot was going to be a bust.  After I got back inside and zoomed in on the pics, they started looking a little better.  Once I got them pulled onto my computer, they looked a lot better.  The snow was very distinct, albeit small, but it gave it a cool effect. 

I tweaked the image in Lightroom to set the proper black and white points, add a little fill light and really make the snow flakes pop.  Then I pulled it into Photoshop to crop it and take out a few distractions.  Originally, the image was captured in portrait orientation, but after cropping it, I extended the frame left and right and cloned in some of the snow to make it more landscape oriented, rather than portrait.

In the end, I was really happy with the picture.  Are there a few things I would change?  Sure, but I really liked how this first attempt turned out.

Let me know what you think.

T.