Allerton Park in Winter

Snow finally made it to central Illinois this year.  It wasn't a ton, I barely had to shovel, but there was snow.  As it fell in the early morning hours of this last Saturday, hoops and hollers could be heard out my cracked window as students up late into the night (myself included) played in the falling white dust.  Two and a half inches lay on the ground at daybreak and I was off to the one place that came to my mind....Allerton Park.  I've walked the park in the spring as flowers bloom, in the summer when the sun beats down, and in the fall when all the colors imaginable are on display.  Never though, had I visited a snow covered Allerton.  I was up on less than five hours of sleep and hit the interstate which at the time was still only partially plowed and made it to the park.  I followed my usual paths, wanting to cover the same things I have during the other season as to have shots of everything in all environments.  The place was dead quiet, all the birds were gone, there were no parties or weddings, it was nature at its finest.  As I made my way through my favorite spots in the park, I had the honor of making the first prints in the snow.  Unlike many people who want the snow out of their way, I would prefer grounds crews stay at home.  Let the snow sit for a while, let us all enjoy the beauty, give us a chance to experience the imagery of "our sins being washed white as snow."  Thankfully I got the chance to enjoy this.The tricky part about photographing snow is like I said before, it's white...like really white.  Not overexposing is crucial.  There is only so much detail you can bring back with RAW processing.  One naturally wants to compensate by underexposing, but you want white snow, not grey snow...so we balance things delicately, bracketing like crazy.  I dabbled with some HDR and one or two of the ones you see may have been processed with that technique, but I challenge you to find them...I  did my best not to make it crazy obvious.  That being said, here are some of my favorites from that cold, still morning.This work by JD Maloney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.