If you ask me what my 2 favorite hobbies are I’ll most likely tell you ”skiing and photography.” Each year I spend almost a month on the ski slopes (not all at once, but over the winter I’ve averaged about 25-30 days of skiing). Several of my friends and I rent a cabin in the mountains for the winter and I try to ski every other weekend. My girlfriend, on the other hand, does not ski at all, and I usually cannot convince her to come to the mountains.
One weekend a friend of ours was celebrating his birthday in Tahoe and she decided to come along. I decided to take the day off from skiing and we went Snowshoeing at Kirkwood Mountain Resort, along their cross-country courses. We decided to do a trail that led to a lake overlook and it had signs marked ”Advanced Cross-Country Skiers Only”, which meant that it was very hilly and quite exhausting.
Along the trail I ran into this dead tree and I really liked the way the wind blew the patters in the snow that pointed straight at this tree. It was also an extremely beautiful day (nice blue skies) so I thought this photo looked especially nice. Note: I didn’t bother bringing my dSLR with me so this photo was taken with my new Panasonig Lumix ZS-7 point and shoot. I’m not a fan of the photos it takes but it does excellent video. It’s the only PnS camera that I found that zooms optically while recording video (and it has a 12X zoom). The ski videos come out great and I’ve posted several on my vimeo page.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS-7:
5mm, f/5.6, 1/640 sec, ISO 80
