practicing with falling snow

It was snowing pretty heavily yesterday and I had a break so I took out my camera to practice my shutter speeds and focusing.  I will not pretend like I know what I am doing when I am taking pictures. I took some photography in college and I have amazing friends with amazing tips.  And while I feel like I understand the concept behind a DSLR camera, when it comes time to pulling it out and applying what I know it all just flies out the window.  For me it's point, focus, fiddle with the knobs, look at the screen, then try it again and fiddle with different knobs.

But I'm trying.

So anyways I wanted to take some type of pretty blurry snowflake pictures yesterday and I wanted to share one thing that I learned with you.  The first pictures I took looked horrible.  All I could focus on was the trees in the background because my camera wasn't picking up the tiny darting snow flakes.  (Unfortunately these photos offended my eyes so I erased them before thinking that I should share one with you.  So I don't have an example.)  

I knew that I wanted to focus on the falling snow between my home and those trees.  I tried darting my camera around trying to catch a snowflake... but that didn't really work.  I probably just looked dorky.  Instead I figured out that if I focus on something closer to the house than the trees, like the bush below my window, then when I raise the camera back up, whatever was the same distance as the bush from my camera will now be in focus between me and the trees.

So I guess that's my tip: Focus on something closer than your backdrop, then point your camera at back at the snow.

And here is a photo with a slower shutter speed.  Those flakes don't look so harmless and benign when they are hurtling towards the earth do they?

If you have any more tips leave a comment or a link please.  I'd love to learn more :)