Beautiful, frosty mornings are, sadly, becoming increasingly rare but last month, here in north Kent, we enjoyed such conditions. Fortunately, I wasn't away running an overseas tour so I made certain I was on-site well before sunrise since once it does it rapidly burns through the frost and your photography's largely over.
For the vast majority of the images I took over those two mornings I used an 80-400mm lens. Although I prefer to use primes whenever possible (they're simply sharper), when compositions lie away from the trodden path and where moving closer effects the shooting angle and compression, zoom lenses are hard to beat. Being mindful that lenses perform at their optimum around f/11, and as many of the photographs required front to back sharpness, I employed the technique of focus-stacking and then merged all the images in Photoshop.
There is no getting away from the fact that processing plays just as an important role in the photographic process as the making of the image in the field, and just like photography requires a lot of practice. When a photographer mentions that they don't enjoy the post-processing side and that they spend very little time on their images, afterwards, I always feel as though they are missing out on something. How on earth can you translate what you were feeling in the field to the final print if you don't have the necessary skills in the digital darkroom? It's essential. Period!
I don't always use a tripod and as the rising sun momentarily appeared between branches I found hand-holding the camera allowed me much more freedom and spontaneity. 
I hadn't been to this location for quite some time and so I was keen to see how it looked under a hard frost. It was a great little area and I doubt I moved any more than 100 metres in any direction over the two hours I spent there.
Using the long end of the 80-400mm I was able to isolate this group of frost-covered teasels. With the background of distant trees, this enabled me to select an aperture of f/8 which provided sharpness throughout the subject yet still render the background soft and uncluttered. 
Shooting into the sun and through melting frost can produce some wonderful effects. 
Viewing these images and now looking outside (and with the forecast looking particularly uninspiring over the coming week), I'm pleased I made the most of this opportunity for even if I didn't return with the kind of photographs I was hoping to capture at least I was there, outside, experiencing nature, and there is no better feeling.
