I think I’ve talked about this before, but for landscape photography as well as closer shots of outdoor location, I much prefer winter.
First, there’s a wider range of interesting weather conditions. There’s snow, for one, which offers some of the attractions of fog but also has an attractive variability. Shooting into a sudden squall coming down off a hill (as in this case) is different than shooting a scene with a steady heavy wet snow falling without strong wind. If you’re shooting color (or even aiming for monochrome), you have to overexpose a little if you really want to capture the white of the snow. In this case I didn’t mind if the snow was closer to grey, as that fit what I was seeing and wanting to capture.
Winter skies often have fast-moving heavy clouds that make compelling subjects, sometimes on the same day when there’s periodic snow or some cold rain. Even days where it’s overcast, the sky often has some gradients in it that are visually interesting.
The more important thing about winter is that the sun makes interesting shadows because it’s lower on the horizon. I really hate midsummer light in the middle of the day: everything is lit up almost everywhere except in the deep woods or under overhangs, and there’s no defining shadows. Sunlight in winter is soft, angled, mutable. Twenty minutes go by at any time of day and things will look differently.
In heavily wooded areas like much of eastern North America, winter also makes trees vastly more interesting, whether we’re talking a distant treeline or up close. They have definition, angle and shape rather than just being puffs of green. They cast shadows full of character. A crowd becomes an intimate circle of faces, each of them different from the next.
I even like the colors of winter: brown, the tired yellow of straw, the defiant greens from the weeds and trees that keep on capturing energy from the sun.
There’s some downsides, of course. On this particular trip, I was pretty well about as cold as I’ve ever been—this was about two miles down a trail and the winds were blowing at 30-40 mph with temperatures in the upper teens. Sunset comes so early that it’s often hard to get shots at that time of day, so the alternative is getting up very early in the morning to get some dawn light, which also makes the “being cold” part even colder. But all of that even comes with some benefits. For one, you’re often completely alone or nearly so on trails or in places that are fairly crowded in summer. I see more animals and birds in the winter—those that are not hibernating or have migrated—than I do any other time I’m outdoors.