Snow dunes

After spending the whole holiday season, figuring out @ and # of Twitter, trying polls and contests and new types of content to increase blog exposure, it was really nice to sit down and relax with the basics photographic concepts. And the basic this time is “Examples. The making of 40 photographs” by Ansel Adams. As much as I am not a film shooter, and most of details are lost on me, the anecdotes are very engaging. I am also fascinated, obviously, by images in the book. Especially looking at the photographs like “El Captain, Winter Sunrise” and “Mount McKinley and Wonder Like” I wonder, if we really need HDR, which I seemed to be so overusing recently. I really can appreciate the scenes on those images with the contract between close to pitch dark shadows (with just a bit of detail, barely distinguishable) and the light of the mountains.
I was thinking abut this experience again, when I took and processed the image below, which has its own history.
Snow drift would be the proper term for it. But last week, after we got several inches of snow on top of already many inches of snow this winter, and some wind just after that, I was watching the snow on out lawn. It made me think about the sand dunes. They look so similar to the formations made of snow. We took the camera, and went to look for the dunes made of snow around town, well, more like outside town. I took some beautiful images, trying to find frames and angles without points of reference to their size. This is one of my favorites. I couldn’t resist turning it into cyanotype, although it was almost blue and white by itself. But then I felt it needs some tweaking, as I wanted to see the difference between lights and shadows, and make the shapes of snow well visible. The final result is almost what I wanted when I visualized this project.