Weekends seem to be in short supply lately. Back in the days I remember that we had weekends that lasted two full days, sometimes even with a Friday afternoon. Nowadays, weekends seem to be reduced to a simple Saturday morning. The rest of the time being occupied by unmovable plans and projects. Now, it’s easy to whine and mourn those long-gone times of weekends that deserved the name of “weekend”, it won’t help bringing them back.

The past winter I have had lots of those mini-weekends. Most of them were used to hunt and shoot wildlife. Sometimes the wildlife was easy to get, sometimes not so. Let’s go and have a look what those short weekends have yielded in terms of wildlife harvest, shall we?

Read more: Winter Saturday mornings

A blog post needs to have a storyline. A blog post needs to have a storyline! This is what I was taught in school. Not so much about a blog but more about dissertations. It still rings true. Writing about anything without a storyline presents the danger of boring your audience. I can still hear my teacher in Dutch language hammering that into our heads.

Nowadays I write in English, Dutch seems to be far away. However, my teacher is still right about one thing. A dissertation or even a blog post should have a storyline.

Read more: About writing

Much like an Indian Summer when summer is already over, Strawberry Spring is a false spring. Last week has seen nicely elevated temperatures, high enough to melt away almost all of the snow and ice of the winter. At the climax of this Strawberry Spring was a night filled with fog.

That’s something that simply has to be shot, in any way possible. Night and fog have always been a favourite of mine. So let’s step out for a minute or two, Something is going to happen…

Read more: Strawberry Spring

Winter is gone. The snow has started to melt, the puddles and potholes are back to haunt our footwear and our cars. With the start of spring also comes more daylight time, whether we saved it or not, it will be here.

This is the time to remember what we shot during those dark days of the year. As usual I find that many of my winter shots have been night or dusk shots. Forget about the dawn shots, ok?

Read more: Shots in the dark

Last Sunday it was forecast to have some Northern Lights. All the signs coincided for a decent show. So the first thing I did was call a friend to enjoy the show together. Then we left for some interesting foreground subjects. Photographing the Aurora is always nice, but the pictures are nicer if there is some interest in the foreground.

So we found a small church, close to Highway 59, north of Winnipeg. It is a Ukrainian Orthodox church built in 1906.

Read more: Heavenly lights

Most often we show, post or publish pictures that are more or less cropped. Sometimes we are lucky enough to get the correct framing right out of the camera and the picture can see the light of day uncropped. Other times the horizon needs a bit of help or we need to crop more from the picture to show the real subject. Cropping is a fact of life nowadays.

While I usually try to get the framing I want from my shots, wildlife doesn’t give us the luxury to walk around the animal and try to take the shot from a different angle. Moving a mere 2 inches can make or break the picture with a branch being in the way or the animal take off in a hurry.

Read more: One to one

Manitoba in winter is a horrible place. There is nothing to do and nothing to see but black and white landscapes. The most exciting things in the snow are your own footprints. That is what we often hear from people that have never been here and have no intention of spending some time in Manitoba. Let alone in winter.

So here are a few pictures of what you can see in Manitoba without making any effort.

Read more: The horrible truth