Wow, this was a hard photo to crop. We got what is hopefully the final snowstorm of the season this morning. Traffic was slow on my normal route, so I took a detour to get into work. On the way in, I kept passing these beautiful stone walls that were lightly covered in snow. I really wanted to get a nice close-up of one of them, however, there were no safe places to pull over (read: narrow country road and slick snow). As I was reaching the end of the "countryness" section of this road, I saw this tree covered in snow that was just incredible. I backed into this person's driveway to get off the road ran out and snapped a few shots.

Because I was trying to be fast, I handheld the camera which isn't the worst thing since I was using the 28-135 IS. The problem is that I didn't have time to really plan the whole thing. I could see when taking the photo that my Tahoe was going to be in frame, but I thought I had room to crop later. It turns out the Tahoe really screwed up the crop that wanted.

It was still snowing too, so there are flakes and subsequent flake trails due to the slower shutter speed. They appear as dust over the darker backgrounds. My *hope* was that I'd sneak out of work as soon as the snow stopped and snap a few shots of some stone walls. That never happened.

So anyway, I spent the last 15 mins screwing around with cropping. I finally settled on a bit wider shot, somehow living with the snowflakes that appear in the lower portion of the photo. This is a tree after all, and it really loses its context without its trunk.

OK, enough rambling on about a tree and snow. . .