Real Snow for the Big Ones

On 22 November 2025 there was enough snow in the garden to fetch the XXL figures up from the cellar. They come up to about my knee and weigh enough that you carry them one at a time. Two trips there and back, and then they stood on the slope between the snow-covered firs, with woolly hats, scarves and a couple of raptors passing themselves off as pets for the afternoon.

Snow you cannot build

Model snow comes in a bag, and in every photograph it looks like snow that came in a bag. Outdoors you are handed everything that matters for free: the crust that gives way under a figure’s foot. The tracks you trod in yourself and have to keep tidying up while you place things. The clumps that drop off the branches the moment you so much as brush one. And shadows that really are blue in November light, without anyone helping them along.

The snowball in a hand is the second example. I pressed three or four before one held together and still looked as though someone had thrown it into shape in a hurry. Too round reads as wrong. A neatly rolled ball looks like a prop; a slightly lopsided one looks like a throw.

The photographer gets cold first

The figures don’t mind the cold. I do. Placing them works better without gloves, and therefore lasts exactly as long as you can stand it. I never managed much more than half an hour at a stretch before my fingers went stiff and the pictures stopped getting better and only got more numerous.

Then there is the wet. On warm hands the snow melts straight away, the water runs down the figures and works its way into every seam. The knitted things soak it up and take considerably longer to dry than the plastic does. I left everything standing indoors overnight, hats and scarves separately, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to put a figure back in its box damp.

The shovelling belongs to it

The pictures with the shovels are from the same day. One figure with a long wooden handle, a blue tub full of snow beside it and two plastic shovels in orange and yellow. That was not a photographic idea to begin with, it was work — the path had to be cleared anyway. Only once the tools were standing side by side in the snow did it start to look like a scene.

That is what I like about shooting outdoors: you plan two pictures and get a third you hadn’t thought of. It can’t be staged again. You have to wait until it snows.