Project 365 week 3 and a Winterlude interlude

I’m having a lot more success being creative with my camera than with my keyboard lately. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, I guess! I’ve been having fun looking for things to photograph, but I had no idea that sorting through the daily snaps (I seem to get between five and thirty a day) to find the keeper is almost as time consuming as coming up with a couple hundred words to post here.

I think my favourite shot this week, from a purely photographic point of view, is this one of a corn field near my house, in about a metre of snow:

Working downtown provides an almost endless series of ideas for my pictures. Yesterday on my lunch hour I popped down to the Rideau Canal for a little bit of Winterlude action. I’d caught a few nice pictures of the icicles hanging outside my bedroom window last week, so thought I’d check out the ice sculptures in Confederation Park. Hard to believe, but in the 20 yrs I’ve lived here, I’ve never done that! But you know what? Meh. They were kind of disappointing. Not just because it was mild and they were melting, but I dunno, I just expected something a little bigger and more spectacular.

I tried a couple of different angles and compositions, but nothing was working. I headed back to work, and walking across the Mackenzie King bridge I couldn’t help but snap a few pictures of the skaters on the Canal. Each day since I’ve been back at work, I’ve been driving the full length of the Canal on my daily commute, and it’s been crying out to me to be photographed. This was just a quick shot, and perhaps one of the most hackneyed and over-exposed shots of Ottawa, but I like it nonetheless.

I have the same problem with picture-taking that I do with writing: how to make something fresh when I know that nothing I am doing is truly original. With a picture like this, I think I just have to get over that and recognize that some pictures are just nice to have in my collection. And now that I have this one, I can stop trying to compose and snap a photo or seven of the skaters on the Canal as I barrel down Colonel By Drive in rush hour traffic.

For those of you following along, these are the rest of this week’s Project 365 photos. (You can click on any of them to embiggen on Flickr.)

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