Winter Solitude

We’d come up for my wife’s birthday to see the Tetons, snowshoe a bit and spend a few days in proper snow, and we never once saw the range. Blizzard conditions held for the entire three days. We went out into it anyway, which is where this came from.

The tree stood in a field near Teton Village, where we were staying, with the snow doing what it does to a landscape in those conditions — flattening everything to white and erasing any sense of distance. A raven sat in the branches. In a scene with nothing else in it, a black bird is the whole composition.

Ten frames went into this at 35mm, which was more about detail than about width. I was on a kick at the time of pushing resolution as far as I could, to find out how large I could print something and still have it hold together on a wall.

I finished this one twice, once in black and white and once in colour, and chose the colour version on purpose. There’s barely any colour in it — you have to look closely to satisfy yourself it isn’t monochrome — and that seemed worth showing rather than removing.

Same blizzard trip as Flickering Flames, The Nail and True Grit.