Rivers, rocks, and first snowfall

The following are from a series of weekends and evening shoots. The tamaracks are starting to turn, and while they are impressive, I wasn't able to find a good composition to isolate and accentuate them. The closest I got was including them in a wider shot:

This little pond in Bird's Hill is becoming one of my favourite haunts...

The ladybugs are gearing up for hibernation, it's sometimes odd to me where they decide a good spot to spend the winter is:

A couple evenings later I found myself down by the river. I've never seen the water level this low, it reveals some of the rocks in the riverbed:

I missed illumination on the closest rocks by seconds, too much fiddling with the tripod:(

The sun was setting, so I turned around:

I'm not sure I made the right choices on the processing of the next one. I felt the background, with too much green colour, would be distracting. But maybe the foreground should be a silhouette. Choices, choices!

A small flock of ducks were enjoying the low water and feeding in the mud. With high ISO I captured their primary motivation, which was either hunger, or a subtle insult to the photographer:

Exposed for the ambient natural light, it was a different story:

Only a couple days later, I woke on a Saturday morning at 5am to see...snow! There were at least a couple centimetres on my car, so I quickly packed up and headed to Bird's Hill. I got there well before dawn and the landscape was a fairyland. You may recognize "summer versions" of some of these shots:

I found post-processing for snowy conditions requires a very different workflow than the summer/daylight stuff I've been doing so far. Normally I rarely touch Contrast and Saturation, and tend to stick to the Tone Curve, the Basics panel, along with a bit of Clarity and Vibrance. However, for these it required more subtle adjustments of the Basic panel, more use of Contrast and Saturation, and occasionally *reducing* Clarity. Vibrance doesn't do anything, because the least saturated elements are already mostly white. Anyway, here's a few more: