imagine

Imagine an evening filled with light so perfect that it almost defies description. Light muted and soft. Nothing harsh to distract or glare. Bright enough to really see, but dim enough to create shadows with imagined things.

Imagine a green so rich that it is almost unreal. A green that could only be alive. A green only seen in spring (or, perhaps, Ireland).

Imagine water. Deep. Still. Water. Reflections of a landscape trapped within. Home to insect, fish, and bird life.

Tonight, I did not have to imagine.

more winter madness

Today was a day for driving around in the snow. So off I went. Brought a friend along, a fellow photographer, someone that I have not seen in a very long time. An absolute age has passed since we last took pictures together.

an old sugar shack that I like to take pictures of - this perspective on it is different from others

We wound up on gravel roads a fair bit. Gravel roads with a good amount of snow. Since I drive a VW Golf, and since the engineers decided that the best place for the rear wheels was as far back as they could go (they are right by the way), snow tended to gather on the back of the car in quite an impressive manner.

it is only getting started here - by the time we stopped for coffee, the back end of the car had all but vanished in a wall of white - signal and brake lights, gone, indent for license plate, gone

Here is what the roads looked like, more or less.

I will grant you, we have some boring roads - this is a problem when they are carved out of the wilderness in a grid - efficient yes, boring, oh yes - very very boring

The primary purpose of this trip for me was to visit, and to take a few landscape photographs across the fields into the snow.

one landscapey shot(s)

two landscapey shot(s)

and a bonus, three landscapey shot(s)!

big sky cloudy

a recipe for delight

Take light, filtered by fast moving clouds and snow.

Take new fallen snow, kicked into the air by winds strong enough to lighten the rear of my Golf and make it "float" for a spell.

Take a camera.

What do you get?

A recipe for delight.

in quest of landscapes

We went on one such quest this afternoon. The day was blustery, windy, and generally blown about. Thankfully, there was no rain to be had, although the sky was overcast.

The quest started, as so many of them do, with a stop in the local coffee shop. This place is a lot like the TV show Cheers, with people yelling "Norm!" all the time. Well, not quite, but there is a good chance of seeing a friendly face each and every time the shop is entered. In this case, we bumped into a good friend of ours who was taking a pause in his day to enjoy a coffee and get some writing done.

There is a lot of pedestrian traffic in the Uptown. Today, through the window, an animated conversation was taking place.

After we left the shop, we sallied forth in search of our landscapes of the day. This is what we found.