I spent the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 in Northern Wisconsin. I would go for a walk every day, bringing my camera along- armed with a different lens or picture profile setting. For a couple of these walks, I set my camera to shoot in black and white. With a heavy blanket of snow covering everything and the trees shed of their leaves, there wasn’t much color to be found and, on the first walk, thick cloud cover washed everything to a flat, muted palette. The next day, the clouds dissipated, allowing the sun to work its way through the bare tree branches and sparkle off the fresh layer of snow. A complete contrast to the dullness of the previous day! The blinding highlights of the snow contoured by deep shadows created an entirely new impression from the overcast environment.
The beginning of the New Year is always a time of reflection for me and I’m hoping to spend more time with my camera, photographing the world around me. I want to focus on taking photographs, to engage in the action of being in the world and interacting with it via a camera, almost with a thoughtlessness. I think I often don’t keep a camera with me (with the exception of my phone) because I’m held back by the idea that whatever I’m doing or wherever I’m going is too mundane or not worthy of being photographed. The most recent posts on this blog have been travel images and while I love to take pictures while I am away from home, I am interested in taking more time to engage with the familiar, to reexamine the mundane and find ways of framing the everyday things around me with curiosity. I’m sure many of the results will be far from perfect photographs, but it’s a chance to train my eye, to look deeper into the familiar, and to get into the habit of photographing. Hoping to create more and overthink less in 2020!