[/caption] After a big snow storm hits the Pacific Northwest you can sometimes get lucky and have a few days of sunny skies which offers some great photo opportunities. There is no better way to get Christmas card ideas than to head out to the Cascade mountains and snowshoe around some of the snow parks. The trees are plentiful and almost beg you to take their picture. The only thing to do is take a bag of lights and create your own private Christmas tree in the National Forest. This photo was taken in the Mt. Hood National Forest after a big snow storm the day before. The weather changed to sunny blue skies with high wispy clouds. I wasn’t using a tripod since the light was pretty bright and I decided that it would be too much work to carry my tripod since I relied on my poles to keep me from getting stuck in the 5 feet of fresh powder. sometimes I just make the necessary adjustment but when I’m on a roll and only stop for a few seconds at a time, I like to just rely on my IS and make sure to review the histogram and keep a steady hand. Too get this photo I set the ISO at 100 and the white balance at -1.3 since I was looking almost directly into the sun. It was about 12:05pm and the glare was pretty intense due to the sun and snow covered platform. I attached my CIR-PL and warming filter and set the camera mode at Program/Normal. The aperture was at F-9 and the shutter speed was at 1/166 second. I was using my Canon 18-55mm kit lens and set the focal length at 32mm.