We’re having an unexpectedly long snowstorm today. The forecast the past few weeks has been calling almost daily for a leichter Schneefall, “light snow”. Usually, there’s actually no Schneefall. However, today, just after I got back from some errands this morning, it started a light but steady snowfall that has after 6 hours, when I’m writing this post, accumulated at least a couple of inches, and it’s still snowing. That’s unexpected – we normally don’t get more than a dusting at a time – as I said, a forecasted leichter Schneefall doesn’t normally materialize. I guess winter is hanging on for the rest of the month here at least.

Anyway, today’s storm reminded me that I’d never posted a photo I took a couple of weeks ago after another unexpectedly strong leichter Schneefall.  

A Path Through the Snow Tübingen, February 2013

I took this the day before that photography lecture I gave a  couple of weeks ago, but didn’t actually look at it on the computer until this week. Which is too bad, because I might have had a different answer to the question someone asked me about whether or not I ever do B&W photography these days.  I mean, I don’t  normally take photos and covert them to B&W, nor do I do any B&W film photography, of course.  So, while this image is now black and white, it technically was taken in color – there just wasn’t much color to speak of in this image due to all the snow. I changed it to B&W on the computer, and applied a “yellow filter” B&W effect to enhance the snow.

Using a yellow filter  is exactly what I did many decades ago when I took my one and only short seminar on photography. We  did a week of B&W photography in that course, and I remember standing outside in the cold taking photos using B&W film with a yellow filter attached to the lens. It wasn’t a darkroom class, however, so we had to send out the film for developing. I remember being disappointed when I saw the end results, although looking back perhaps fiddling in the darkroom could have enhanced a couple of those images back then.

However, the experience left me very unsatisfied with B&W photography as something to pursue for my photography hobby, since at the time I had no funding nor space to set up a darkroom. And I knew that without that, B&W photography wasn’t going to be as much fun as the color stuff I was already doing.

Now, of course, I can sit inside, warm and snug on a cold and snowy day, and fiddle to my heart’s content in my digital darkroom to enhance the lights, darks, and shadows on any image, B&W or color. And, I can even approximate some of the same effects after-the-fact by applying a virtual yellow filter to a B&W image of the snow. Nice.

Anyway, seeing my photo of a path I’ve never taken that runs through a park near us in Tübingen brought back that memory of a photography path I didn’t choose to follow all those years ago.