When it comes to winter in Minnesota, the past few years have been practically polar opposites in terms of precipitation. The lack of snow makes for great driving conditions, but unappealing settings for photos. So when you are looking to capture great photographs of winter I suggest thinking small. Like the photograph above I was lucky enough to stumble upon these ice crystals during a dense fog on this chain link fence. It is easy for to just stand back and take a photo of the frost covered fence, but the surrounding landscape did not provide for a clean focused image.
When you look at a subject you should always be mindful of what is going on in your background. If you have a busy or distracting background you will want to see if you can create enough "Bokeh" or a shallow depth of field with a wide angle lens. Use this to throw the foreground and background out of focus and keep your focal point tack sharp to draw a viewer's eye in to your subject. By using a large aperture ie. f/1.4 setting on your camera you can achieve this when you are zoomed in or at a long focal length.
Get out and photograph!
