Snow in February

This past weekend Champaign-Urbana got a bit of winter storm "Linus".  While we didn't get as much snow as we wanted (4"~ish of the wettest snow we've ever seen), it stuck well to things and the running off and freezing let to some beautiful things Sunday afternoon and evening.  We ventured to a couple of the parks in Urbana and got some photos of nature dripping with this latest snow.  While we didn't have as much time as we wanted with the sun up so we could go more places around town, it was still good to get the cameras out again and do some shooting.  This adventures stands in stark contrast meteorologically to our prior blog post from the plains of Africa.  While the cold isn't as fun to be in, going on these outings can be a good exercise in finding the beauty that is around you that you may not realize...then coming up with a compelling way to photograph it.  This is our first winter with our macro lens (that we acquired in march).  I hope to get to use it some more if we get some more snow.  There are a lot of things that look awesome when frozen and close up.  You'll see some a good amount of photos in this post come from this lens while the majority of the rest come from the other new lens we got in 2014 (our telephoto zoom).  Hopefully you enjoy the photos, especially if you're some where warm and missing the snow (you know you are...), or if you didn't get a chance to trudge around in it this past weekend.  Keep your eyes out for another snow post, assuming we have another storm, we've got some more places we want to get to while the snow is still fresh.  This work by JD Maloney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.