Tifah's snow portrait session took place at Pawling Park in Pawling, New York, photographed by Acromatico during an unplanned winter snowfall. The shoot happened on a few hours' notice and moved from a snow-covered playground onto a frozen lake, capturing Tifah free-spirited and at ease in a true winter wonderland.
This session started with a text. Two hours later, Acromatico and Tifah met up with no plan and no fixed destination, heading to Pawling Park in Pawling, NY, simply because the snow was falling and the colors were perfect. Nothing was scheduled. Tifah rocked the shoot by just being herself, and her free-spirited, happy, go-with-the-flow energy carried the whole day.
The session moved from a playground in the middle of a snowfall onto a frozen lake, where the photographer overcame a longtime childhood fear of falling through the ice, warning sign and all. They fell a few times and laughed even harder. It was, in the photographer's own words, a day worth remembering, and a reminder that when you just be you, it shows, because photos don't lie.
“Sometimes, you just need these kind of days. Where you go wherever they take you and sometimes they just take you where you've never been.”
Good to know
Pawling is a town in Dutchess County, New York, in the eastern part of the Hudson Valley near the Connecticut state line, roughly 60 miles north of New York City and reachable by Metro-North's Harlem Line. Its mix of village streets, parks, and open countryside makes it a quiet, scenic option for portrait sessions, and after a fresh snowfall the area turns into the kind of winter setting this session captured.
For winter portraits here, daylight is short, so the best window is usually the few hours around midday and the soft light before sunset. Fresh snow stays cleanest right after it falls. And as this session is a reminder: frozen lakes and ponds are never guaranteed safe — posted THIN ICE warnings are real, and bundling up for cold, slippery ground is part of the plan.
