The two mornings this weekend could not have been more different.  I woke early on one morning to take some photographs of a stand of trees with sunlit brown leaves that have their own magic color in winter.  It was cold but sunny, and you could hear the bird sounds that seem to increase every day at this time of year.  I even saw the first robin of the season - spring must be here soon.  Though I knew the forecast was for a little snow later in the evening, it just didn't seem like it would happen.

It happened.  And so I got up an hour before sunrise and left the house to go wander again in some fields and woodlands.  On my drive, I just couldn't believe how everything was lined in white.  Surely I must have seen this before in the fifty-plus winters I have lived through - but it felt like I was seeing it for the first time.  The light was a beautiful blue-white and everything was lined in white - no hint of wind had yet knocked any of the snow off the branches.

I enjoyed the next three hours wandering through the fields, watching everything change before my eyes.  While I was wandering around that snowy winter morning, I was very aware of how the colors changed as the sun rose, and then climbed higher in the sky.  When I completed the work on a small set of images from that morning, it told a story of the changing colors of a snowy winter morning.

Snowy winter mornings are all about shades of white, blue and gold.  Aside from the pre-sunrise image showing the pink sky, all of the images are combinations of white, blue and gold.  The early photos are all blue.  And as the sun breaks the horizon, the first golden color enters the pictures, and it becomes a tug-of-war between the reflected blue light of the sky and the direct golden light of sunrise.  As time passes and the sun rises higher, more and more golden light enters the frame and eventually takes over.  The blue light of dawn on a snowy winter morning is brief, but memorable.  

A short Photo Story from February 2018, by Brian Reitenauer.