When winter rears its frosty head and a big snowstorm hits, amateur photographers, professionals and hobbyists around the world break out their cameras, sit back in the warmth of their homes and let their gear capture the gradual accumulation of snow.

Recording the build-up of the frigid, fluffy white stuff through time-lapse videos has become increasingly popular in the past few years with more advanced cameras becoming cheaper. More and more amateurs are creating dramatic videos that show the accumulation of snow on the ground -- speeding up hours of a winter storm into minutes or seconds.

We scoured the web to find the most dramatic snowfall time-lapse videos and chose six of our favorites. Each video is accompanied by commentary from its creator.

Above:

“Shots began on 2/5/2010 around 5pm. I have a Nikon D300 SLR with an internal interval timer. I set it to take a shot every 15 minutes. As far as technique, I knew the light levels were going to change throughout the night and that auto-focus would be problematic as well as cause extra strain on the battery. I pre-focused on the chairs in the center of the frame, then I set the camera to manual focus.

I relied on the camera to determine exposure and locked the aperture and allowed the internal light meter to adjust shutter speeds accordingly. I set the camera to spot metering and told the metering system to meter on the snow just to the right of the table, as that would be a consistent location to determine brightness. I ran out of battery power at about 6am the next morning, which gave a nice 12 hour time-lapse. In terms of snowfall, we received around 25 inches in 12 hours -- some drifts around the house were close to 3 feet”.

-- Dave Wujcik, Oakton, Virginia
Video courtesy Dave Wujcik