Video ID: es2048 Title: Midday Mountain Snow and Water Location: Colorado, Summit County

This sequence is a study in contrasts and dissolving boundaries.

The composition itself opposes different scales – large and small masses of white snow against dark backgrounds with varying shades of white produced by shadowed and submerged snow-ice and dark water modulated by reflection and wind and the sometimes visible bottom.

Steady snowfall contrasts with occasional swirls driven by windy gusts and eddies that suggest a more violent storm.

Because of uniform light, the falling snow is primarily visible against the dark background of water, where it dissolves and disappears, but not against the snow-covered land and rocks where it continues to accumulate.

Beneath the clear dark water are patches of snow-ice that change due to almost imperceptible melting during the course of the sequence.

A thin, almost invisible skin of ice left from lower nighttime temperatures resists the wind-blown ripples in the foreground pool at the beginning but continues to dissolve with the passage of time.

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