January Catch-Up: A Month of Winter Photography
- Mike Page
- 3 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Most landscape hotographers, when pressed, will tell you that they're favourite time of year for taking photos is autumn: The shadows are growing longer, the light softer and the colours can turn some wonderful shades of yellow and orange. Mine is winter. The low contrast and simplified structures cause my shutter-release finger to itch uncontrollably.
The year started with a short week with Dad in Somerset giving us a chance to re-visit some old haunts; no visit to the south-west of England is complete without a visit to Lyme Regis (all the better if it involves a cream tea at Bell Cliff!) and we've recently re-discovered Bath as a new favourite for shopping expeditions.
Returning to Bavaria I had to complete my last academic assignment for the Masters programme before hitting the thesis and dashed off to Lake Ammersee to capture a satisfying series of abstract images in the ice.
January has remained cold down here though without much precipitation. It has, however, been a great month for fog and hoarfrost.
Despite the lack of snow in the lowlands, we managed to pack in three cross-country ski trips in the mountains, culminating in a 28 km run in the Karwendel with some of the best ice crystals I've ever seen.
Bath and Lyme Regis
Going back to your home country as a long-term ex-patriate is an interesting experience. Apart from the fact that prices and idioms are frozen in your mind at the date you left, you tend to have a series of snapshots of your home country in your head of how things were and like the proverbial frog in the pot, you become more accutely aware of changes than you would be if you had remained there. My wife was born and brough up in Cambridge and while her parents were alive we would visit two to three times a year. Watching the slow decline of the town centre over the years as quintesentially unique stores have given way to yet another Starbucks or Costa Coffee has been hard. Yeovil (near my folks) has been hit even worse; walking down the highstreet there are a number of boarded up shops and the remainder seem to be either charity shops or Poundlands. Bearing this in mind, when we were back in October, Sharon and I decided to head to Bath for the day. I was slightly nervous about returning to a city that I saw on a daily basis for a couple of years on my commute home from a summer job in Bradford upon Avon. Would the city have suffered the same fate as the others?
It turned out that my fears were completely unfounded. The city is thriving. It's difficult to understand why Cambridge and Bath have diverged so markedly. Both have a similar size population, both are on the tourist circuit, both have unique architecture and a combination of retail and culinary outlets. Yet Bath has managed to retain a significant number of iconic one-off shops including to wonderfully quirky Mr. B's Emporium.
No trip to Bath would be complete without a trip to Pultney Bridge and the Royal Crescent. I also snuck into the Abbey to take a cheeky vertical panorama.
Pulteney Weir
Lyme Regis is also always good for a photo or two, all the more when combined with an impressive sunset over the Cobb.
I don't do a lot of street photography, but when I do, it's usually in Lyme. The seafront is particularly good for a sneaky shot of people enjoying themselves by the sea.
Frozen Leaves at the Ammersee
I've mentioned before that I'm presently engaged in a Masters program for photography with the Arts University of Bournemouth. In January I was preparing to submit my last full academic assignment before embarking on my thesis. The prompts have frequently left me scratching my head for ideas and this one was no different: go out and take a series of photos under the rubric "conceptual photography".
But I didn't have a concept, so I went out and started shooting anyway. One of our local lakes is quite shallow at the northern end and tends to freeze quite quickly close to the shore and it's one of the first places that people go to skate when it gets cold. At the back of my mind I had some Lowry-esque images in my mind. His painting "Northern River Scene" of skaters on a frozen river with a background of industrial building was triggering some ideas, but it was a long way from being a concept.
Frozen Leaves in the Ammersee
I've been exploring the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi a lot of late which embraces the beauty that can be found in imperfection. The idea has two sides, one involving imperfection in the image-making process (broken lenses, light leaks, low contrast, etc.), the other seeks the beauty in imperfect subject matter. I knew as soon as I saw the first beech leaf trapped in the ice what my series was going to be of, even if I hadn't yet realised what it was about.
Out and About in Kaltenberg
Like I said at the beginning, January has been a good month for hoarfrost. Freezing conditions and an abundance of fog has led to some great scenes. Some could be shot from the comfort of the home; I noticed the rime outlining these branches against the fog from the bathroom window.
We've discovered a new circuit round the villages and found a bunch of new local compositions. The frost on trees completely the changes the dynamic of images in the winter. Otherwise dark branches become lighter bringing brighness and detail into parts of the picture. I love the interplay with the tracks and the forest here as well as the frozen tree -ent.
Cross-Country Skiing
One of my USPs as a photographer - and perhaps one of the reasons why I love shooting in the winter - is that I get to places that other photographers might not get to, whether by cross country skiing or snowshoeing. We're far from the only people who engage in these sports, but few practitioners are mad enough to carry a large digital camera on such excursions.
A first trip to Ettal near Oberammergau saw us in and out of snow flurries all the way out to Castle Linderhof and back giving rise to some wonderful wintery images.
I was particularly pleased to have been spotted this church at the crossroads in Graswang. I know the year's young, but I can see this getting into my top ten of the year.
Our last excursion was to the Eng Loipe in the Karwendel, a 28 km trek along the valley bottom to the Großer Ahornboden - the Great Maple Floor. Several days of sub-zero temperatures in the valley floor combined with high humidity had led to a massive build up of ice crystals on the trees. The result was some of the best ice crystals I've ever seen and I was so glad to have the camera to capture it all. The Olympus f/4 12-100 mm lens is no macro, but I was really happy with the images that I was able to capture with it.
Ice Crystals
Last but by no means least was a quick stop to photograph a frozen waterfall on the Schronbach that had caught my eye on many a previous occasion. Taking care of the traffic on the narrow bridge, we were able to catch these gorgeous images without a tripod. Again, Olympus for the win! The on-board image stabilisation and ND filter allowed me to get some beautifully crisp 1/5 and 1/2 s images.
All in all I think that this has been a productive - if somewhat eclective - month of photography. Are you also a winter photographer, or do you favour a different time of year?
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