Don't you just love when it snows? That excited feeling waking up in the morning and knowing that it's snowed without looking outside, because of the special quietness after a snowfall.

I took my long 75-300 mm lens along with my sister and dog to try and get some real action shots. We chose a spot with lots of snow and a reasonable background and Jane started throwing snowballs at Dora the dog. It's much harder than it looks! I kept the aperture fairly small (f7.1) because I know from experience that I won't be able to get sharp images when the dog is moving so much. I put the camera on burst shooting to maximise my chances of getting a good shot, but then found that the focus point was sometimes moving on to the background. So I put the lens on manual focus which worked well, so long as Dora stayed roughly in the same plane. Here are a few of the images I got:

Acrobatics in the snow dog trying to catch snowballs   Playing with the dog in the snow

Running with the dog in the snow

There was quite a bit of fiddling necessary in Lightroom afterwards as the contrast was huge with white snow and a dog that's nearly black! I lifted the shadows quite a bit, increased the clarity and warmed the images up a bit as it makes me feel better! I hope you like them.