Project 365: Baby it’s cold outside!

Looking back over my year in pictures, I’m surprised to see how many of my favourite images were shot outside. There really is no substitute for natural light, I suppose. And even though the temperatures have really bottomed out in the last week, most of my pictures were in fact taken outside.

The only time I feared for my camera was yesterday morning when I took this shot of a windswept farmer’s field off Fallowfield. It was -30C with the wind chill, but I loved the colours of the snow and sky just before the sun came up. Mind you, I was so cold and anxious to get the shot done that I made the one “rookie” mistake I seem to have the most difficulty overcoming: putting the subject dead centre in the viewfinder! Oh well.

This was another early-morning shot, of that spectacular ice fog that caused the 60-car pileup about 10 minutes after and 5 km away from where I was taking this picture.

This one was a lot warmer, both from a colour and a climate perspective. (He’s such a ham. We’re in so much trouble with this one! I called it “I’m so cute I can barely stand myself.”)

Call this one my abstract period. It’s actually a silver star-shaped Christmas ornament, with red, blue and yellow LED lights reflecting off it, shot with a screw-on macro filter on my lens. I like the movement and the shapes in it. Plus, it was late, I was tired, and this was an easy shot!

This one has a not-so-nice story behind it. It’s the train trestle that passes over Prince of Wales just south of Colonnade, and I’ve always thought it was interesting-looking. Last Friday on our way to the Land Staff luncheon at the Cartier Drill Hall, two of my colleagues were in a fender-bender practically underneath the trestle. Nobody was hurt, and it wasn’t my colleague’s fault, but we spent about half an hour waiting for the police and my eye kept wandering up to those creosote-covered beams against the bright blue sky. Finally, I couldn’t resist any more — and of course, I had my camera with me.

It’s been a busy week. No really? BUSY! So it was good to multitask, piggybacking the photo of the day on to other important seasonal activities, like the annual baking of the shortbread.

Christmas lights and snow. A hard combination to resist. This was almost the shot of the day, but in the end the next shot won out.

There was no way I’d be able to do an entire 365 project without trying my hand at a long-exposure Christmas-tree lights shot! I cranked my aperture way down (up? I always get that confused) to f22, and the camera selected a 30-second exposure to get this one right. (The tiny f-stop helps make that star-shaped flare on the lights, but I guess LED lights don’t flare very well — and they also “burn” the image on long exposures up close, but I’m not sure why.)

This wasn’t my tree, by the way, and I’m pretty sure the neighbour who watched me haul my tripod out of the car and set it up on the curb was thinking some very unChristmas-like thoughts, based on the stink-eye she was giving me. I think I’ll go photograph her house next week, just to freak her out.

And, ahem, there are only two days (phew!) of voting left in the Canadian Blog Awards. I’m just sayin’.

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