Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008
It snows in the city just like in any other place far enough from the equator, and Chicago is a place that gets frequent snows. So it’s not at all surprising that I have some photos of snowstorms from my time living there.
Usually you think of cloudy days as dim and dreary, and snowy days make you feel cut off from the world. But when it snows in the city, every single light source from all the cars and houses and streetlights get caught by the snowflakes and reflect around. And when the light gets up to the cloud layer, it frequently bounces right back down, careening off a particle of water in the cloud. And of course, the time when we have the most lights on is at night, for some odd reason.
This has the odd effect that snowy nights in the city are actually rather brightly lit, as all those photons bounce around. It’s certainly bright enough to read by, and people just continue on as if it wasn’t snowing.
But then, very little affects the patterns of a city.
