Frosty Year's End - 2023
Welcome back!
I returned home from England with a mix of relief and regret…it’s been a while since I’d travelled, and never for such a long period, so I expect that’s a pretty normal reaction. Photographically I have to admit it was a bit of a challenge re-embracing familiar locations. It felt a lot like “same old, same old”, but I tried to see it with fresh eyes. Luckily a morning of fog and frost made for a glorious last week, but we’ll get to that at the end.
I’m still drawn to the contrast/conflict between human-imposed order and natural chaos, so here’s a few in that vein. The abnormally warm and wet weather meant a lot of clinging snow, and I think that worked to my advantage as it stuck to both human and natural surfaces:
As much as I like the subject, this is poorly framed…
I’m not sure the symmetry in the above shot works as well as I’d hoped, but I still like it…maybe just because it was so hard to get. I was crouched in the mud and probably looked like a crazy person to all the dog-walkers crossing the bridge, but these are the sacrifices one must make :)
A familiar scene with a new coat of paint…
Most of these were early morning, sometimes before the streetlights were turned off. I kind of like this pair of the Assiniboine Park bridge, each with its own jogger. For the first, the ice and runner show movement blur, because the exposure time was 1/4 second:
After the jogger disappeared, I saw this little snow-baby resting on a bench. He was kind enough to pose:
Other mornings were brighter, cloudless skies with intense shadows. The camera struggles with this kind of thing, and you have to be careful not to blow out the highlights too much, and not lose detail in the shadows:
Returning home on that bright day, crossing a different bridge, I saw what looked like a load of paper plates in the river:
It was baffling, I thought somebody had lost a pallet from a train or truck. Turns out this is ice. When the water and air temperatures are just right, ice can get caught in a whirlpool between rapids and an eddy, spinning and growing until they outgrow the swirl and get cast into the net of the larger eddy downstream. They’re all roughly the same size because that’s the size of the swirl in which they were formed.
New day, new ice formation…well, bubbles really. This pond has a lot of organic activity, and because we had such a long mild early winter, the bubbles get trapped in the ice as it slowly forms:
Even though the ice was several centimetres thick, I could occasionally see new bubbles rise from below, only to get trapped in the slush below the hard surface ice. It was pretty interesting to watch.
I’ll end on the frosty note. We had a cool night (about -8C…which is 12C above normal, kind of crazy to think about) and a warm fog came through, coating absolutely everything. When the sun came up, there wasn’t a cloud in the intensely blue sky:
I did add a polarizer, as the camera tends to wash out the blues. It’s very easy to overcompensate though, so I made sure to dial it back:
While I was quietly fiddling with the above shots, I glanced up and saw a buck leaping away. He did some incredible bounds, which I was too slow to catch, but luckily he stopped, thinking he was hidden. I thought the frosty bushes made a nice frame:
Finally, a familiar tree. The rich brown under the tree shows how little snow we’ve had:
And that ends 2023! Photographically it’s been a hugely rewarding year. Despite my natural inclination towards procrastination, somehow the world keeps throwing wonderful experiences at me. I’m also grateful for all the kind comments and constructive critique.
Cheers to you all and take care!
