Some winter photography

It's been a while since I've posted photos, and we're in that part of early winter here where it's not very photogenic outside. It snows, but not enough to stay and be pretty. The trees have shed most of their leaves, but not all of them, so they just look pathetic. It's starting to be cold out and no one has adjusted yet.

So I thought I'd show some winter photos from previous years, to remind me that better parts of the winter are still ahead of us.

This is the St. Croix River, just east of the Twin Cities, in December 2009. I remember this photo as being a pretty big deal in the advancement of my landscape photography; it has real composition, and strong detail that you can't really see in the online version, and good negative space. It's kind of bittersweet to look at it now and not really see it as anything special.

Black Dog Lake in Burnsville, MN, in January 2013. Part of this lake is kept unfrozen all winter by power plant waste water, making it an anchor point for the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Mostly just playing with silhouettes here.

A few winter shots from my series of environmental portraits of people reading, all from the winter of 2012-13.

A panorama from a local park, in the April blizzard of 2013, when I went out tromping on foot in weather that would have been a very bad idea to drive in.

Mackinac Bridge, December 2014. Still one of my favorites, with the silky long exposure of the lake water and the hard detail of the ice on the bridge piers.

Lake Superior ice at Two Harbors, January 2015. I didn't end up liking any of these enough to put in the portfolio, but they're still fascinating. Ice sheets form on the surface of the lake and then come in and shatter on the breakwater of the harbor, forming these structures.

These are all fairly old, as I haven't done any significant winter work in the last few years. I'm hoping to change that a little bit this year, but I tend to be sluggish and unambitious in the winter, which makes it difficult. Hopefully getting a chance to look at some of these will inspire me to get out and work again. I'll leave you with the best one: a panorama of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis on the winter solstice of 2012, with the sun rising over the new 35W bridge.

I keep a five-foot framed print of that one in my studio just to remind me of what things can be.