Day 3 - Snow Painting

I don't think there is much in nature that can rival a landscape painted with fluffy white snow. The crystal brushstrokes soften lines, highlight colours and bring a wonderful freshness to everything they touch, whether natural or artificial.

With 15 or so new centimetres of snow scattered around the city, Fredericton took on a magical look today, making the job of taking pictures easy but the job of choosing pictures hard. I went out about mid-morning and, in a three-block walk, snapped off about thirty photographs, any one of which I would have been proud to post here.

The top picture shows a narrow laneway between two streets in the city, with the trees that drape the scene beautifully covered with new-fallen snow. The middle picture, my personal fave, is a slightly cropped close-up of a long-needle tree (do NOT ask me to name it) painted with snow.

The last photo is a little more creative, with an extreme close-up of the snow-speckled name-plate of a battered old pick up truck. Even this banal little sign is made lovely by the flakes of snow. Now, I'm realizing that Blogspot offers only a limited amount of space for each blog so I think I'm going to have to be a bit more selective with how many photos I post per day.

Still, I think my project is off to a pretty good start.

Day One: Winter Scenes

Day one brings an absolutely beautiful January day here in New Brunswick.


With the lovely weather today, I spent as much time birding as taking pictures but, unfortunately, the camera couldn't catch the two beautiful nuthatches that my binoculars found. Still, the day's winning photograph shows the patterns of light and shadow on a path in Fredericton's Odell Park, making an interesting pattern with the many tracks people have left in the slowly melting snow.

The runner up is an interesting shot of two paw prints in the snow. It looks like a dog managed to place her the left toe of one paw right into the print of the right toe from the other, so that the two separate paws meld into one design.

Both shots were taken with the camera on its automatic settings, so it was simply a matter of point and shoot. And I was pleased with the framing and composition I captured in the original photograph so I didn't have to use iPhoto for any cropping of the shots. All in all, a pretty good start to my project, I think.

One Day to Launch

It's now December 31, 2010: one day before my year-long photographic adventure begins. I'm already starting to feel the pressure.

And I'm already attempting to deal with that pressure by coming up with a mental list of photographs that I can take, especially on days when nothing new or spectacular springs to mind.

People, pets, places, all forming a list in my brain.

But, perhaps more importantly, angles, effects and approaches are also starting to assemble themselves in my head.

What will be my first photo? I'm no sure.

Check back and see.

A Visual Beginning

decent.

I still haven't figured out how to set it completely on manual (for shutter-speed and aperture in particular) but that's what this process is all about: learning my camera and maybe even a little more about photography.

My plan is to launch this project on January 1 and try to put up a new photo every day. A little daunting, I think, but it could be fun.

Come by and visit often. Post your comments and tell me what you think. But remember, no matter how bad these photos are, they're mine and I'd appreciate no one stealing them for their own purposes.