I guess winter is different everywhere in the world, but living in Canada, palm trees don't quite say winter to me. That being saiid, we are having a rare Christmas with no snow on the ground this year.
These are all high dynamic range images with extreme darks and bright highlights. I would tend to use exposure bracketing to bring out shadow details in these images. I find the large areas of dark gray just too uninteresting in these shots.
Thanks Mike - we are having one of those rare Christmases where there is no snow on the ground. It used to be that this happened once every 50 years, but we've had this happen twice in the past 10 years now, thanks to climate change.
Fresh snow is always fun to work with as a photographer (one gigantic reflector) that does a great job of fooling the camera's metering system (+1 exposure compensation is often a good starting point). If it weren't for the travel restrictions due to COVID-19, I would definitely be looking at heading someplace further south for at least three or four weeks to take the edge off the winter. I guess that won't be happening again this year...