Snow

It's the first of April and the snow continues to fall outside, the longest and coldest winter on record for my part of Germany seems to continue unabated.  It is not that it has been excessively cold, we have had much colder spells, minus 25 being the worst I can remember.  It is simply that it has been cold for such a long time, since the beginning of January we have had snow on the ground almost all of the time.  On the 24th December I recall the sitting on the bench in front of my house in a T-shirt enjoying a coffee basking in the 20 degree sunshine.  We joked about the winter that wasn't and the green rather than white Christmas. Well, it changed,

If I had been studying landscape this might have been a boon, although even a course based upon the landscape needs some variety in the weather.  For Social Documentary it really began to limit what I could do, it just was not the right conditions for spending long days wandering the streets in search of the decisive moment.  I took a break waiting for spring and Easter when people emerge from their houses and the beer gardens open.  Some hope.

I did, however, take a few photos during the snow, many reflecting the rather bleak mood that I found myself in after Christmas, the recent shock of a family death descending into a melancholy that reflected in the photographs that I created.

I was interested in using the snow to change the landscape of my images by taking away most of the usual detail that fills the world we live in.  To do so I heavily overexposed the pictures at the time of exposure and then in post processing pushed the contrast to the limit and dropped the saturation.  The result was a washed out appearance coupled with patches of dark colour.

The photos became progressively bleak ending in the one above with its almost total absence of any detail, just a photograph of a snow field with tiny tonal variations in the white.  Although this was a very introverted activity it oddly helped me to portray visually how I felt and in a sense was a way of mentally emptying the waste paper basket.  In parallel I started to point my camera at people, again using the same bleak aesthetic, but allowing the people to become little points of colour and form in this barren world.

I found myself becoming attracted to the dog walkers and the relationship between dog and person.  Children playing also made for some interesting patterns of interaction.

Finally I started to enjoy myself and took a few photos that attempted to capture the simply joy that children have in the snow.