For those who love winter, it usually is spent on daytime activities and warm evenings in front of a fire with something or someone hot. For other people, like photographers, winter nights often spell magic, but outside. When the nights are cold and clear, photo opportunities are multiplied. It’s not just about clear starry nights, it’s what light and temperature can bring into a picture.
Let’s see what a winter evening and night can bring us.
It’s nice to be a photographer in winter, always something to shoot. What I like to shoot apart from wildlife, is human activity. Without activity of people around me, winter would be very sterile. To photograph activities in winter you need active people. So this time I will show some active people.
People who do something or leave a trace of something interesting to shoot. Preferably in the warmth of some place with a fire or some other form of heating.
‘t was a few nights before Christmas on a dark and cold night. A half frozen photographer was cradling his beloved camera out in the cold. He was desperately looking for something to shoot, but the cold had frozen his eyelids. As well as his camera shutter and battery. The lonely man shivered, he hadn’t shot anything for weeks and now the year was coming to an end. Never in his picturesque existence would he have believed that the end of the year could be so dark.
The squeaking snow under his feet suddenly lit up. He had arrived at The Forks in Winnipeg. As if by magic, someone had flicked the switch to light up all the trees and walkways around him. He was saved!
So, after having brushed off my nostalgia for the summer months, it’s time to see what we can do in the winter months. If I listen to some people, winter seems to be the time to stay inside or move to warmer climes. Most definitely no snow, ice or frigid temperatures, please. In Manitoba we can enjoy all seasons in a reasonable package during the year. Even if winter seems to have the upper hand.
Does that mean that we need to stay inside? Not for me.
Ah, those nice, warm summer weekends! Old Man Winter has barely arrived and already we long to be back in summer. So what are we to do? Stay inside, huddled up by the fire and wait? Perhaps. We can also go out and enjoy the cold weather, but some people will have issues with that.
My take on it? Simple, go back to your summer weekend pictures and enjoy the memories.
It is this moment in the year again. TV evenings full of war stories and heroes as well as horrors from all wars never to be forgotten. So this time it is my turn to write a story about the war. Not that I have been in one as a baby boomer, but I heard enough stories from my parents to be fairly close.
Perhaps that’s a big word. We can never come close to the sacrifices many soldiers made to ensure our current lifestyle. That is one thing that should forever be in our minds.
Before I acquired a macro lens dedicated to doing macro, making those shots seemed like a daunting task. Everyone told me that I had to get one to get a way better quality in my shots. It’s true, a dedicated macro lens will reveal way more details than any closeup of a subject using a different lens.
But before I had my DSLR, I had a small point and shoot. Those little things, even if they are getting “out of style” today, pushed from the market by cellphones, had a phenomenal possibility for macro shots.
A few weeks ago, it was summer. Hot days and warm nights. The ideal time to go camping with the loved one. We had been roasting here in Winnipeg for a few months already so the time had come to take some of that to a different place. We decided to go east. The west was burning and suffocating from what we had heard.
The east, as far as Ontario went was still fairly spared from forest fires and it looked like the best solution for us. So east it was.
