Ok, I'm kind of cheating again, but in a different way.  I've had about 4 days of really poor shooting and I haven't been posting often (I'm almost done with DST so I'll get some time back soon).  So... I'm doubling up this time.  Not really a bad thing, since these two were similar. 

First, a tree (probably a Japanese maple of some kind).  I was mostly playing with the depth of field (DOF) and focal lengths here.  I like the way it came out because this pretty clearly shows the DOF you can get on a high-contrast picture.  You can get a slightly narrower DOF by using a wider aperture, but that would have sped up the shutter speed and the snow would have been shown up as specs on the picture.  You takes what you gets and you lives with it sometimes.  The B&W conversion was done in Elements... it does a better job than the on-board engine.

The second is a vine (yes, I know it looks a lot like the tree).  This is a pretty poor picture.  But, it shows the falling snow the way I wanted it to.  You'll probably have to go to the larger sizes in Flickr to see it, but it's there.  The snow flakes are streaks, not specks.  The snow was falling much heavier in this shot compared to the last one, which is why you can see it.  I did this the easy way...  I just took a bunch of shots at different speeds and this one worked. Ain't digital great?  :)  It just so happens that this was taken at exactly the same aperture and speed as the previous shot.  Dumb luck.

BTW... I know it's out of focus just a hair.  That was camera shake caused by me.  I was getting a bad case of "wet camera fear".