Ice fishing is not as popular in Iowa as it is in Minnesota. But there are some fans, and several weekends ago when we were hiking around Coralville Lake and Lake Macbride, we saw some of the tents. When we were coming back towards the end of the day, the fisherman were preparing to leave their positions as well. I found the spot and was waiting for those to to position themselves against the sunset sun for this image.

It almost was no-blog Friday. I want to look through all the images in took in last few weeks and pick up some stock uploads. I checked the blog to see the stats, and here it is – no post scheduled for today! I new it will happen, I am so busy recently, that I am scheduling most of the content on weekends for the following week, and then forget about it until I have time next weekend.
Either way, we took some neighborhood photowalk last Saturday, and this is one of my favorites of the day.

A few weeks ago, we went one evening downtown to get some interesting pictures of the streets for a Digital Photography School weekend challenge. Our assignment image is buried somewhere on page 23, but this one I think I like even more. To get to the final effect, however, I did some playing with Lightroom and Photomatix. It is one-image HDR, custom white balance, and blue graduated neutral density filter on the sky.

I took this image a couple of weekends ago. We were walking along the lake not far from our home. We wanted to take some photographs of small waterfalls where the lake meets another reservoir, but it was frozen and not impressive at all. In the meantime, it was getting close to sunset, and I saw not only the amazing clouds on the sky, but also the sunset colors showing through the trees. I snapped several images, I loved what I saw, but it turned out to be a challenge to achieve the same effect on the photograph.

We finally managed to get some snowboarding this season, with weekends being mostly too cold so far. It was a great time off everything, just snow and me. But on the lift and when we were packing the car, I grabbed several shots with my iPhone. This is my favorite. We were taking some snaps of sunset with silhouettes of group of people, and we were happy with the results, when this girl came in the picture.

It was a beautiful day, I was off work, I was running errands and just had my iPhone with me. I took a number of images of those berries, all around town, and was so disappointed when I uploaded them on my computer. Side note- I never put an iPhone image on blog before I see it on a big screen. What happened, and what I have not seen on the small screen on the iPhone was how dark the berries came out- there was too much contrast between overcast sky and them. So I took my big camera and retraced my steps, to take the images I wanted!

I was not using my iPhone camera recently too much. As I mentioned before, the noise in low light situations was driving me nuts, and I was hardy ever outside during the day. Really the first occasion came today, when I went to run some errands and saw those beautiful red berries covered with light snow which came out absolutely unexpectedly in the morning. Those below I was able to photograph nicely with my small camera, but it did not work for the large berries on the trees because of the contrast between them and the sky- for those I went home to grab the big camera, and I will post them on some other occasion.

After spending the whole holiday season, figuring out @ and # of Twitter, trying polls and contests and new types of content to increase blog exposure, it was really nice to sit down and relax with the basics photographic concepts. And the basic this time is “Examples. The making of 40 photographs” by Ansel Adams. As much as I am not a film shooter, and most of details are lost on me, the anecdotes are very engaging. I am also fascinated, obviously, by images in the book. Especially looking at the photographs like “El Captain, Winter Sunrise” and “Mount McKinley and Wonder Like” I wonder, if we really need HDR, which I seemed to be so overusing recently. I really can appreciate the scenes on those images with the contract between close to pitch dark shadows (with just a bit of detail, barely distinguishable) and the light of the mountains.
I was thinking abut this experience again, when I took and processed the image below, which has its own history.
Snow drift would be the proper term for it. But last week, after we got several inches of snow on top of already many inches of snow this winter, and some wind just after that, I was watching the snow on out lawn. It made me think about the sand dunes. They look so similar to the formations made of snow. We took the camera, and went to look for the dunes made of snow around town, well, more like outside town. I took some beautiful images, trying to find frames and angles without points of reference to their size. This is one of my favorites. I couldn’t resist turning it into cyanotype, although it was almost blue and white by itself. But then I felt it needs some tweaking, as I wanted to see the difference between lights and shadows, and make the shapes of snow well visible. The final result is almost what I wanted when I visualized this project.

The convenience of an iPhone. You stop at red light, see an image, take iPhone out, the camera app on and… snap a photo. Like this one- we were going downtown Iowa City for lunch, when I noticed the spiral of smoke coming out of chimneys in power plant. And that the two smokes were of different color. I thought it would be an interesting image, so … I took it .

One thing I realized taking all those pictures with my iPhone for last several months is that it performs awfully in low light situations. I follow thebestcamera.com feed, and it doesn’t seem to be a deal breaker for all those pictures, but it bothers me nevertheless. Anyway, I decided to post something far less grainy this time, I took this picture one of freezing days this winter, freshly after snow fall. I have been trying to picture the newly arrived winter, an that detail shot did it for me.