Let it snow...

Snow is most certainly the photographer's good friend. Especially when it's fresh and forming pretty patterns, it's a great pleasure to just observe it wandering through the woods. Which is, by itself, quite a powerful experience, especially after having lived in the jungle of concrete, that is Chicago, for quite some time.
It was a lovely walk and one of the nicer family moments, and the dog was crazy and excited as well. The raspberry plant above obviously didn't get rid of its leaves in time.
One of the weaker points of my 70-20omm lens is the macro capabilities. With Canon 500D close-up lens it improves moderately, but the depth of field becomes extremely shallow. In
the following photo I tried to increase it by setting the aperture f number to 20, but even so, at 200mm focal length and close distance, the acceptable depth of field was only around one milimeter! Not only is this a problem when composing the picture, it is also extremely difficult to hold the camera so still that it doesn't move while you focus and take the shot. Other than that, I really like this photo.
At times, the snowy forest was offering really spectacular things to see.
I was also trying to shoot extreme macro, and this is about as close as I was able to get, pretty good for a non-macro lens, I would say, but the quality suffers:
And that's it for today, unless you want to see little Filip posing... oh, what a heart-breaker, who could resist? :-)