Behind the Lens: Capturing "Veiled pines" (ep3)

December can surprise you. Not with dramatic light or a blazing sunset — but with the simple fact that it snowed overnight and everything looks completely different in the morning.

That's exactly what happened on December 2nd, 2023. The snow had fallen the day before, and it was still sitting fresh on every branch. I had a free Saturday, no particular plan, and decided to just drive around the area near my home and see what I'd find. No fixed destination, just looking.

I took quite a few shots during that outing. Some were alright, but nothing I was really happy with. I was almost ready to call it a day when I came across a group of pines.

I stopped immediately.

Against the flat white sky, the trees had this colour combination that I hadn't expected. I'll be honest — I normally find conifers a bit dull to photograph. The green is too dense, too uniform. But with the snow muting everything, that green had turned into something quieter and more interesting. And against that muted backdrop, the reddish-brown of the trunks just popped. Warm against cold, rough bark against soft snow. The diagonal lines of the branches added to it — the whole scene had a graphic quality that felt almost abstract.

I set up and took a few test shots. It was immediately obvious that I wouldn't get the whole scene sharp in a single frame — the telephoto compression and the depth of the tree structure made that impossible. So I decided on the spot to go for a focus stack. Five shots at different focus points, which I later merged in Lightroom to get sharpness from front to back.

The result is one of those images I keep coming back to. Not a typical winter landscape, but something more graphic and quiet. Sometimes the best shots come right at the end, when you're already thinking about heading home.