I hate the cold. Below 80 I'm starting to get cold, below 70 I'm freezing to death. Cold is painful. Like knife stabbing painful.
But Snow makes some nice photos so I soldiered up and took the Nikon D2Xs for a walk.
For some reason, of all the cameras I ever used, that one always nailed a perfect white balance when shooting in the snow. Also, the only charged battery available was a Nikon EN-EL4a... I should keep more batteries fully charged.
So, the cold is painful, no doubt that influences what I see and therefore what I shoot. From a purely practical point of view, I should have taken a tripod, or a camera or lens with stabilization to compensate for my shaking like I have Parkinson disease.
Doubling or tripling was sometimes not enough to get a steady photo. Guess I just have to deal with it. I envy normal people who don't suffer those terrible sensory issues.
As I said before, the snow totally changes my mood (not for the best), and what that forest looks like. It is not a happy forest. Well, it never really was in the first place. Snow makes it more inhospitable, more menacing, more lifeless.
But at the same time it's quite more peaceful. The silence is welcome, I can't imagine the nightmare it would be to walk in that cold forest if on top of it it was noisy.
Snow makes my forest a bit more evil, to me at least, but I think it is also much prettier. It is somehow hiding defects, the dead things, covering what I don't want to see with pure white.
It wasn't a big snow storm, it didn't last long, the temperature wasn't low enough for that snow to stick. At the end of my walk, it was already melting, making an ugly dirt wet mess of everything, the first step for things to rot a little more.
While I'm going deeper in that forest, I can't help feeling tremendous crippling sadness. While I appreciate the loneliness and the peace, especially the absence of any other biped, everything else is just wrong.
I feel I'm going deeper in nowhere, deeper in hostile territory that even the little birds have deserted. What is waiting at the end of the path? More nothingness. More cold. Plain death.
All I want is to actually leave that place. But I don't want to go back on the same path. I don't wanna see it again. I just keep going for a loop, hoping to see and shoot more.
Something I eventually notice is the blue is gone. Of course, no real surprise, blue is my color. Green on the other hand, not so much. At least the snow attenuates the green. Doesn't help with the despair emanating from those woods.
I reached a point where I just couldn't cope with the cold anymore. I had enough of that place. Had to go back to the path, and walk faster.
There is too much chaos in this forest. The dense intricate branches are an impenetrable wall. They barely let light pass through. I actually think they are hiding something.
Yes, snow makes things somehow, kinda, sorta pretty.
I don't like it.
