minnemalism

a recent snow and a balmy 32 degrees (0 degrees C) got me outside with my camera today, using the snow as a freshly laid white background.  i spent a blissful hour photographing the long shadows cast by cattail stems and tree trunks.  frozen lakes with fresh snow are the equivalent of a white sky to me–the most generous of STILL backgrounds. it’s hard to play with scale when i am making images on my kitchen floor (my usual location), so when i get a perfectly white frozen lake, my distance and perspective open up. i made a series with these cattail stems poking up through the ice, casting winter shadows. so you’ll likely see of few more of them. we have lot of surface water in minneosta, and five months of snow cover. so this is a quintessential minnesota scene. it’s a wonder we not all natural minnemalists (pun intended) with sights like this burned into our psyches.

winter cattail stems