p4pictures: Cold weather fun

Ever since I woke on Monday morning the landscape outside my front door has been a lot different from normal, we've had some snow courtesy of a weeklong cold snap. It's made driving conditions treacherous and for some of the week the local children have been enjoying a couple of days at home as it tough for the teachers to reach schools. On Friday morning I woke early and saw that my car was heavily frosted, yet by the time I'd showered and had breakfast snow was falling rapidly and there was almost 3 inches of snow on top of it when I left home. It seems that the Oxfordshire area where I live was hit pretty hard and many major routes were all but impassable.

So with the weekend here and some bright clear skies it's a great chance to get out and take some photos of the landscape under a thick blanket of frozen snow. The temperature overnight on Friday had made the slushy snow of Friday turn in to the rock hard ridged ice of Saturday, and the wonderful powdery snow had turned to fine crystalline snow with a hard ice crust. Seizing the chance to get out I walked out of the edge of the village in to a white winter wonderland and shot pictures for about two and a half hours. Wrapped up warm I was fine until I realised that all the bright light had gone when I needed ISO 800 to have a chance to handhold shots with the 17mm wide-angle lens. The EOS 50D had no problems in being out in the cold for two and a half hours, even the battery still showed full despite quite a bit of low angle live view work and a lot of reviewing the histograms on the LCD.