The Tracks Of Your Tears

Despite all of the words that you see printed here on this page, I'm not really that much of a talker.  I'm more of the quiet guy who sits in the corner and listens to everyone and what they have to say.  What I've heard a lot of you saying over the past couple of weeks is that you're all sick and tired of winter.  I hate to be in disagreement with the majority, though it wouldn't be the first time, but I don't share that opinion at all.   Bring on the snow!  May the temperature stay in the minus-whatever range for as long as possible!  I could go on for a while, but this is supposed to be a blog on photography, so I suppose that I should get back on subject.  Last year I took a photograph of my footprint in the snow, but then played around with it in Photoshop so that it would kind of look like I had walked on the moon.  I was trying to think of a way to do something similar this year, but I wasn't sure what to use.  I was walking through the parking lot where I live one day last week and noticed all of the tire tracks on the freshly fallen snow.  I suddenly realized that I had found the snow tracks that I was looking for.  I had to wait a few days before a fresh layer of snow was on the ground, but I got the perfect conditions I was looking for on Sunday morning.  Oddly enough, I took this picture exactly one year after I had taken the picture of my shoe in the snow.  I suppose that it's not an exact science, but if there are any gamblers out there, you may want to place an early bet on there being a light snowfall on March 1st, 2015.  I went and dusted off my car and took it for a quick ride around the block.  It was fairly warm that morning and most of the snow had already melted off of the road.  I wanted to make sure that my tires would be bare when I would be driving on the snow in my parking lot.  The plan didn't go exactly as planned.  It may be time for me to look into buying new snow tires because I didn't get the kind of deep, detailed impressions that I was looking for.  Before I gave up, I decided to walk a little further through the parking lot and found that one of my neighbours had left the exact kind of tire marks that I had been hoping to make.  I pushed some of the snow out of my way, knelt down and began to snap away.  I liked the connecting lines of the first shot and took more of a close-up for the second shot to get the tire tracks in greater detail.  The first shot was taken at f/20, 1/200sec, ISO 100 at 55mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/8, 1/1600sec, ISO 100 at 70mm.  I know that many of you are sick of looking at snow, so maybe try and focus on the tire patterns here.  I'd hate to be responsible for any screen or tablet related damage due to snow-rage.