A bootless endeavor

The beauty of the winter woods is hard to capture on camera. There are technical difficulties, of course--sun reflecting off snow makes exposures difficult, producing blown highlights and washed-out details. But before you even think about finding the right settings to capture both bright light and deep shadows, first you have to get out there, all bundled up in coat hat scarf gloves boots, except I don't have boots that fit right now so I wore thick socks and the same ratty sneakers I wore on the beach last week. I figured the sneakers would serve as an effective alarm system: when my feet got wet, it would be time to go back inside.

I had to dig deep in the hat-and-glove basket to find the deer-hunting gloves I used to wear when I was a journalist covering cold outdoor events, thick lined gloves with flaps that fold back to allow the fingers freedom to adjust camera settings. Those gloves must be 30 years old and I rarely wear them but when I want to use a camera in the cold, nothing else will do.

I took my walking stick, not just to keep steady in the slippy spots but to probe the depth of the drifts I was wading through. Light, gentle snow has been falling on and off for two days and at any given moment it doesn't look like much of a storm, but over time it covers everything.

When the world looks like a black-and-white photo, every subtle flash of color stands out: rusty brown oak leaves, mottled green and gray sycamore bark, faded beige yucca pods. At the birdfeeders cardinals and bluejays provide a splash of color amidst the crowds of little gray and black birds--titmice and chickadees, woodpeckers and juncos. 

I kept seeing shades of blue-gray in the frozen creek, pink in the sky, purple in the shadows surrounding snow drifts, but the intensity of the white overwhelms all else. It felt pure and clean and sculptural, but it also felt cold, very cold, and my feet got wet and warned me to go back inside, where my photos don't seem to convey the still beauty of the scene so I have to rely on making pictures with words.

Bear's head fungus capped by snow.