Winter Colors

West Michigan winter returned to form, mostly, this past week, with snow and clouds and a lot of gray skies. Those gray skies matched my photography mood, as I grumpily tried to get inspired with an idea of what to photograph.

Not quite an epic failure. Perhaps a direction. [Click on images for a larger version.]

I did some driving around, listening to music, which was pleasant. I went by a scene I’d photographed this summer and redid the image, now defined by snow rather than grass. There is almost no visible color. The image has a bit of a brown tone in it, a product of heavy shadows, warm tone that I used to process this image (and the post’s cover image).

I was trying to capture the light, which was somehow both gray and painfully bright unless I wore my sunglasses. The “somehow” is, I assume the snow reflecting what light there was. The triangles of power lines and snow nicely draw in the eye.

The cover image is a school, on a street just off Fulton, a mile or two east of the East Beltline. This image perhaps suggests a project for the next month or two of winter–contrasting the snow and characteristic gloomy West Michigan winter skies with bright colors.

The yellow, blue, and white in the trim and window frames of the school drew my eye. I also liked the geometric shapes in the architecture in contrast to the random shapes in the snow and asphalt of the parking lot.

Stay warm and stay safe out there. The roads are slick, as the temperatures go up and down. The Omicron wave of COVID-19 is happily retreating in Michigan, and we should celebrate this fact, but COVID discipline is still important to prevent another disruptive wave.