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I love the winter time, especially when it's just snowed. There's something about that blanket of white that's very appealing both from an aesthetic and photographic point of view.

This particular photo, taken in Loggerheads Country Park and looking out towards the Clwydians mountain range, shows what I mean.

Normally, when doing night time photography, any part of the ground not lit by artificial lights comes out just black and featureless, and if there's too much of that it can kill a composition stone dead.

But shine the light of even a partial moon on a snow covered landscape and there's enough reflected light to show up detail and bring the scene to life.

In this scene, the combination of moonlight on the snow, torch light on the tree, the moon itself and the spill of artificial lights from a handy farmhouse give a really nice overall lighting effect to scene that just wouldn't have worked in summer.

I'm already looking forward to this coming winter - I wonder how a time lapse sequence of this view would turn out?