Eliminating the foreground fence would make it easier to get the rest of the picture in focus, even without a view camera, and would let you use a higher view point to open up the far field, or a lower view point to make more of the frosty grass in the foreground.
The leaning post is nice (and nicely placed) but the post-and-rails far fence is more photogenic than the wire in the foreground.
I would have used a longer lens and looked for a vertical composition, taken from a position to the left of the camera position in this shot, with the horizon one third or two thirds of the way up the windmill, with the shadow diagonally across the far field.
Dick, Thanks for the advice. Next time I do an ice-covered fence and windmill in studio I'll keep your suggestions in mind.
But let's talk about composition, framing and cropping for a moment. I could have shot the windmill without the fence, and a closer-cropped, even vertical view was in my mind as I walked the fifty feet or so through the ice to get to my vantage point. But one big mistake a lot of photographers make when they shoot this kind of thing is to forget about context. Rob's suggesting the windmill without the fence, and Stamper's suggesting cropping off the rest of nowhere that shows on the right. (I expected the cropping suggestion, by the way. It's always there.) But the windmill by itself would simply be a windmill with ice on it. The windmill and fence would be better, but still leave out the fact that this particular windmill and fence are in one of the most godforsaken spots in the central United States. By the time I got to where I could shoot, I had time for only one shot. This is it. John, I did turn to shoot the sun, but it was disappearing and the shot was no good. Didn't see the sun again for more than three hours on down the road, and then only for a moment.
Doug, I grew up in Michigan. That's not exactly Maine, but it's close enough. Yes, in Michigan I'd probably call this frost, though if you'd spent the amount of time I spent scraping my car windows, and then driven through the ice-filled clouds that were depositing this "frost," you'd have called it something else -- probably something not fit for inclusion in a family forum.
Probably, faced with the situation, we'd all have made different shots, and all probably would have been good since the subject matter was good. The moral of the story is: When you're driving across the prairies, keep your camera on the floor next to your foot, and look, look, look.