30 Days with the Fuji 35mm f2: Day Twelve

It’s been snowing quite a bit in Colorado over this Thanksgiving weekend. Since I’ve not yet returned to work and my actuary mindset, I’m doing my best not to consider what the combination of the weather with all the holiday traveling is doing to auto frequency…Instead, I’m trying to just enjoy the beauty! And take a few pictures, of course… 🙂

After I moved to Chicago, I realized how much I had taken snow for granted growing up in Colorado. Sure, there’s still plenty of snow in Chicago, but it’s very much “unproductive” snow in that it mostly just screws up traffic patterns and doesn’t create many opportunities for fun winter activities. Now that I’m back in Colorado, I’m excited to take advantage of and fully appreciate the skiing and snowshoeing and beautiful views of snow-capped peaks. And since I work from home and have no commute, I don’t even have to worry about the road complications!

Ok, enough gloating — back to the image. The snow was falling lightly when I took this shot, and I wanted to make sure I used a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the falling flakes. Finding the right shutter speed for this can be a little tricky, but it’s much easier than trying to freeze rain since snow falls so slowly. Since I also wanted to blur the background to further emphasize the fish (as though they needed any help with those vibrant colors of theirs…), I was able to just open up to f2.8 and achieve both goals easily. I could have opened up all the way to the lens’s max aperture of f2, but doing so would have been pretty unnecessary given that the falling snow was already frozen in the frame at the f2.8 aperture’s auto shutter speed and there was already plenty of background blur. Also, like I mentioned in my last post, the maximum sharpness of the lens usually occurs in the middle of the aperture range (around f8), so I wanted to keep as close to that aperture range as possible to preserve sharpness while still achieving my primary goals of frozen snow and background blur.