I was born in Wyoming, and can faintly remember colossal amounts of snow that would drift up to the rooftops. Having migrated to the Ozarks, and now the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, the past few decades have been rather lacking in the “snow” department. I’m thankful for even the rare glimpses of winter that we get here in East Tennessee, and for all of the crazy snowstorm names these days. (Is that just a marketing scheme for the Weather Channel?) Neptune, Octavia, or Pandora notwithstanding, my inner child tends to come out on snow days. Once we put the kids to bed, I got out my favorite photo light, a Profoto B1 and used both the flash-bulb and continuous LED lamp for some video and stills.
I must have been channeling some JJ Abrams, as we had just recently watched both of his Star Trek movies. Hence the other-worldly look of the results! All of these shots were made using the ambient light to make the star trails, and then the pop of the flashbulb to freeze the snow’s motion.
I then flipped the Canon 5DIII over to the video side, and shot some slow-motion clips, racked way out of focus to use as projection backgrounds for worship songs at our church. I used the 5DIII and a Canon 35mm 1.4 L lens because of its versatility and sharpness. My daughter Lola’s hat served as a weather cover for the camera during my shoot, and I kept the light from harm’s way by keeping it under the eaves of my garage.
Stay tuned for an entirely different take on the winter weather; a compilation of film shots from a couple of medium format cameras!
John
here’s a shot from my iPhone of the setup
