Winter Colors

This turned out to be a pretty good week for photography for me, a bit to my surprise, as I seemed hurrited about it all week. I picked this photo of ice boats on Reed’s Lake in East Grand Rapids for my favorite image of the week. The bright colors and sunshine on a Sunday afternoon, and the kids and adults in the background playing hockey, all struck me as cheerful. I also like the masts from the ice boats.

It’s been a long winter. I spent an hour this week taking snow off the back half of my roof and hacking out the beginnings of an ice dam. This picture is of the other side of winter. The lake also was busy with people ice fishing.

Maybe it was a better week for photography than I expected because a couple of times I embraced winter and got outside for a walk or drive with my camera, rather than fight it. Maybe the week as a whole turned out well, because I make headway on a couple of research and writing projects and other stuff at work.

Some of the other pictures that I made this week are fun too. Rather than try to shoe horn them in with the text, I’ve created a gallery.

I’m not sure why I so like the one of the old Dish Network satellite dish on the back of my house. I suppose I like how the dish is isolated, abstracted, and decontextualized. And I like the shadows in the snow on the back of the roof. It seems striking to me. When my wife, Simona, saw it, it took her a while to figure out what it is and where it is.

Another fun picture this week is one of my espresso maker, taken one afternoon when I had no desire to go outside and was looking for something in the house to inspire me. They’re such cool looking devices and I start my day, everyday, with this one. I was not sure when I took it, whether I’d want to process it in mono or color. The machine is a lime green color, very bright and cheerful. Very Italian. But in the image, the color was distracting, as I thought it might be, so I went with black & white.

Then there’s my dog, Jonah. He’s loyal to a fault, obsessively so. In the picture he’s looking into the house to make sure he I don’t leave the kitchen and disappear up the stairs. If a person followed me so closely, I’d need a restraining order.

Finally, there’s several more outdoor images too. A couple are from the Nature Preserve at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids. One is from Reed’s Lake in East Grand Rapids, of an observation deck looking over the lake, taken the same afternoon as the image of the ice boats, but earlier, when clouds still covered the sky.