The “Beast of The East” hits Nottingham…

Earlier this week Nottingham had been caught up in very severe snowstorms as “The Beast From The East” – a cold front of Siberian origins swept across the UK , causing major disruption to cities and travel infrastructure – particularly within Scotland.

The first seven images were taken walking around Nottingham City Centre late on Wednesday evening after I’d been helping out at Notts Tweetup . It was quite striking how quiet the City Centre was with buses being diverted and very few people venturing into the city. (I will say that our event was fairly well attended in spite of the snow!) . With fresh snow falling throughout the evening it also made for some striking urban landscapes – with a perfect carpet of snow in place of the tarmac.

The final three images I’ve posted were seen at Forest Recreation Ground on the Thursday evening-  With a bit of spare time before an assignment I ventured across to see people sliding down the snow-covered walkways. The winds really picked up this evening to make conditions particularly inhospitable – I saw a couple of people hunker down to keep their face out of the winds (one pictured).

These were some of the most difficult conditions I’ve had to photograph anything in – the cold winds means you need to keep moving and simplify what I did with the camera as much as possible , finding quick compositions and hoping the snow drifts didn’t interfere with focusing while I left the camera to do the rest. I usually prefer to be far more calculating but working this way has been a useful change for me – it’s easy to forget that the perfect can be the enemy of the good on occasion”