Beating the Winter Doldrums: Creating Beautiful Winter Images Without Any Snow

Creating landscape images in wintertime is always a unique challenge filled with its own obstacles and rewards. Chasing after that one composition that you've been dying to capture, trying to get out and capture that crisp winter scene before any of the snow becomes filled with the footprints of other photographers and adventures, and simply having the opportunity to see familiar views in a completely different season is something that many photographers look forward to.

But what do you do if your scene is simply devoid of any snow? The surrounding trees and brush have mostly, if not completely, lost all their leaves. Many of the elements that come together in landscape images to provide detail, color, and contrast are reduced and sometimes completely missing during winter. Fortunately for us, there are ways of working around those limitations to still be able to go home with shots of which you would be proud of to print and share. In this video by Lewis Carlyle, of Sun Gallery Photography, we are given some pretty great tips as to how to make the most of those seemingly dead winter scenes.

In just a few short minutes, Carlyle details for us how he navigates such shoot conditions and what he looks for in creating possible compositions. The video contains several great sample images which help paint the picture for us concerning the shots that are described in the narrative. I have run into the exact same conditions that he talks about in this video and a couple of the things that he talks about are simply compositional choices that I hadn't really thought about. Personally, I am looking forward to putting his advice to work. If you have found yourself in similar shoot conditions, where the scenes of nature just aren't quite what you'd want them to be, what have you done to make the most of those situations? Make sure to comment and let us know what your approach would be.

[via Sun Gallery Photography]