Watching the Rochester Squall Roll in
This is another shot I captured during an annual family holiday trip back to Rochester. Unlike the photo I posted in Photo City Blues which I captured during the same trip, this composition was not technical in nature. Instead, it relied entirely on the environment…and a bit of luck.
When we checked in at the hotel the week prior, I noticed that I could just make out the Lake Ontario shoreline from the window of our room. Unfortunately, the angle and distance didn’t make for a particularly great perspective when it came to photography opportunities. However, the height and orientation of the window offered a great vantage point for observing the day’s weather conditions.
The morning of January 8th, 2020 (Happy Birthday, Mom!) began with blue skies and only a trace of white on the ground from recent snowfalls. As I gazed out towards the lake, I could see that the blue skies were not going to persist much longer. Where the shoreline should have been visible, a uniform, grayish-white wall took its place. And it was moving fast. I vaguely recalled hearing an unfamiliar tone as I dragged myself out of bed earlier that morning. When I unlocked my phone, I was greeted with an Emergency Alert. That white wall was a snow squall moving into Rochester from over Lake Ontario, picking up several inches worth of snow which it would soon deposit on the streets of Rochester.
While we were in Rochester, we carved out some time for our son to hang out with his friends. Visibility on the drive to pick him up from his friend’s house later that morning was near zero, and traffic had slowed to a crawl. By the time we turned into the neighborhood in which we would transfer responsibility of our offspring, nearly 4 inches (10.16 cm)of snow had accumulated.
Watch the below timelapse to get a feel for how fast this squall rolled in.
A heavy snow squall hit the city of Rochester shortly after 8 a.m. on Wednesday cutting visibility drastically. pic.twitter.com/ySKbd2U3AP
— Spectrum News 1 ROC (@SPECNews1ROC) January 8, 2020
Getting the Shot
As we made the turn onto Edgemoor Rd, in Brighton, this wintery, picturesque neighborhood scene began to unfold in my windshield. This particular neighborhood is quite nice and is lined with sidewalks, mature trees, and historic harp-style street lamps. Still, even a nice neighborhood is not immune to the daily clutter of everyday life. Properties littered with forgotten snow shovels, political signs, and Amazon packages don’t add value to a fine art photograph.
These are the types of things we tend not to notice when we walk or drive through a neighborhood, admiring houses and mentally copying and pasting their covered front porches and window trims on our dream houses. In fact, some might agree that they add to the charm of a neighborhood. But in a photograph, all the little details that make up the facade of our neighbors’ lives can serve as distractions. This is not so in an active snow storm.
Recognizing this, I immediately stopped and ran to the back of the car to get my camera, much to the bewilderment of my family. My wife watched with fascination, her face fogging up the rear passenger window, as I shuffling around in the middle of the road with my camera pressed to my face. After exploring different perspectives, I finally found the right composition. This didn’t reduce the perplexity of my spuse. The view of Edgemoor Rd that I sought could only be found at ground level. The only way to get the shot was to lie in the middle of the road.
Since the squall-induced traffic put us behind schedule, I was going to have to make this quick. After checking for approaching traffic, I dropped down on to my stomach, framed, focused, and fired off a single shot. The whole maneuver looked like a slow, lazy, photographer’s version of a burpee (anyone interested in a photographer’s boot camp?). Normally, I would check focus and composition on the back of the camera, but my wife was reminding me that we were running late, so I had to trust that my technique was sound.
Photography: Storytelling
As a photographer, my goal is tell a story with a single image. I try to give the viewer a window into a place in space and time, while evoking an emotion, a sense of what it’s like to be where I stand when I press the shutter button. This can be quite difficult to do in an image without people and expressions. While there are no discernible people visible in this photo, the hyper-localized blizzard on this Rochester January morning offered a unique opportunity to cleanly portray a quaint neighborhood in Rochester. Even though the street and homes have been purified by fresh fallen snow and the evidence of its inhabitants have faded away, this street in Brighton, NY isn’t just a collection of houses, cars, and manicured lawns. It’s a neighborhood, made up of humans.
The Composition
I’m drawn to symmetry and repeating patterns. I also like to use leading lines, and sculpted light to draw the viewer’s into the center of the image. In this image, I quite like how the street curbs, tire tracks, and receding line of street lamps pull you into a vanishing point of a white snow wall at the end of Edgemoor Road. But I especially love how the only color in the image, the yellow-fire hydrants, repeat and shrink into the distance and bring you to the same white void. The blur of falling snow adds an atmospheric effect to the scene.
Technical Details
I captured this image with the Olympus OM-D EM-10 Mark II with the Olympus 12-40 F2.8 PRO lens. 40 mm, F5.6, ISO 200, 1/50 second. Edited with Adobe Lightroom.