Cold winter weather is uncommon here in the Mid-Atlantic. From my four years in Connecticut, I remember snow and ice perpetually lining the sidewalks from the holidays until the end of February, and snowdrifts piled several feet high after each perfunctory blizzard. Here in Baltimore, snowstorms are rare, and they seem to be getting rarer over the past seven years. We’re lucky if our snow accumulates, and the deep freeze is but a brief annual event - a biting frost that plunges out of the northern skies for a few days before giving way to the cool crisp air of the region, which verges on memories of early spring.
This year, I was fortunate again to be off hospital duty during one of the season’s two snowfalls - a quick afternoon storm that poured a few inches onto the waterways of the Chesapeake basin. The photos here were taken on two separate outings - one morning in the pine groves on the north shore of Liberty Reservoir, and another along the lower mainstem of the Gunpowder River, at the county line. They represent both the challenging shooting conditions (numb fingers, slippery surfaces, and rapidly draining lithium batteries) and the deep satisfaction (beautiful natural patterns and dramatic, slow sunrises) that are attendant to winter landscape photography.
