Cold Winter
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Text & Photography By Inna MalostovkerI
live in Miami, Florida, because it’s as far away from sub-
zero temperatures as I can get without leaving the country.
So, when work took me to Bismarck a few winters ago,
the fact that North Dakota tops the list of coldest states in the
United States hadn’t escaped me. It’s not that I hate the cold;
the problem is that it triggers an irresistible desire to curl up in
bed and hug the covers all day. Add to that a forecast of cloudy
conditions for the duration of my stay, and it didn’t look like
I’d be taking too many photographs on my trip.
But the lure of fabulous fresh snow proved harder to ignore
than my aversion to its side effects. Foregoing my preferred
photography hours of sunrise and sunset, I ventured out in the
middle of the afternoon in temperatures that, to a Miamian, felt
like a hundred below (likely not quite that far below freezing).
I went to the Sertoma Park—also known as Riverside—a large
municipal park along the Missouri River, home to an amusement
park, the Dakota Zoo, the Lewis & Clark Riverboat, walking
trails, picnic shelters and several other recreational activities.
Normally filled with visitors, the parking lot was deserted except
for a lone polar explorer walking his dog. Surrounded by tow-
ering snow piles, I set off down the Riverfront Trail.
Everything around me was bland and white: the ground, the
trees, even the sky. But the frost on the tree branches was gor-
geous. To emphasize it, I decided to fill the frame with nothing
but trees. There was not a lot of variability in my subject, so
I found a composition that showed the most perspective and
depth and set my focus to about a third of the way into the
scene. This technique works well when the scene as a whole is
the subject. I set the aperture to ƒ/11 to allow for good depth of
field for the first few layers of trees with some blurriness toward
the background. Shutter speed was set to 1/160 of a second to
avoid worrying about any camera shake while handholding.
Usually, when I’m out shooting, cold or heat bothers me
much less, but it didn’t take long before I started to lose sen-
sation in my fingers and toes. Satisfied I had already scraped
together more shots than I had dared hope for, I fled to my
car and retreated to the nearest purveyor of warm beverages.
I later processed my RAW file as HDR to bring out more contrast
and then added a low-opacity layer of vertical blur to smooth out
the trees and emphasize the frost-covered branches. OPSee more of Inna Malostovker’s work at imphotoart.com.behind the shot
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