Out in a Blizzard – a One Shot Stoy

In 2022, I started my film photography journey. I had recently moved to New York City and had a lot of free time. To get acquainted with my new home, I would walk 10 miles of Manhattan’s 14 mile length every Sunday. My first attempts to document my adventures left me disappointed. The liveliness of the park on a sunny afternoon was reduced to a flat sea of grass. The stories and energy around me were completely absent from the photos I took. If I wanted to capture the feeling of the city, I needed to get serious about my new hobby.

My camera stopped being something I saved for Sunday walks and started being something I couldn’t leave the house without. I ended up purchasing a number of smaller cameras so I would be more likely to keep one with me. A Bessa R2 w/ a Canon 35mm f2 (loaded with Ilford HP5 @ 800) ended up being the right size for me.

Winter 2024 rolled around and, thanks to a blizzard, I was granted a day off of work. I decided to grab breakfast and couldn’t leave my camera behind. Even after living here for almost 3 years, it was still thrilling to know that when everything is closed, things are always open. As I exited the building, I was greeted with the blinding white of the snow, and a lone man hurrying back home to shelter from the weather. When I went to the darkroom later that week I was elated. I had made the photograph I had been trying to create over the past two years.

I knew that the light from the snow would cause the subject to be backlit and be seen as a silhouette. An unintentional (but appreciated) side effect was that some of the falling snow is visible in the foreground, contrasting with the darker areas of the scene. The shot being exposed for the snow covered trees combined with the aforementioned snowfall captures that feeling of a cold winter’s day. Yes it’s cold and wet, but I’m still going to go out into the city I now call home.

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