An Icy Welcome to 2016

Ice #214 (Icescape). Boulder Creek, Colorado, 2016

With temperatures well below normal around these parts for the past many winter days, why not welcome in the new year with an icy “landscape”?

I really like the abstract feel of this photograph. I can imagine a strange, other-worldly mountain range of ice globule peaks, with a black cirrus sky above.

For me, there is sort of a “falling into the zen zone” feeling that comes over me as I walk an area with my camera–in this case, a frozen Boulder Creek–looking for unique perspectives on which to base the creation of an artistic image. It takes some time, but eventually my brain starts to visualize unusual scenes hidden in the commonplace…I am in the zone.

This afternoon, I hit the shutter maybe 70 times in the hour or so I was freezing my toes along the creek. Back home, on the computer, I erased about half of them as not worthy of further work–usually problems with exposure, focus, basic composition, and depth-of-field. Of the remaining 35, I spent some time post-processing a dozen, with one or two worthy of sliding into the “keeper” file.

Looking at my digital “proof, or contact, sheet“–that is, how the individual images progressed from the first capture to the last–there was a definite flow. (Call it an…er…ice flow maybe?)

At first, the images missed the mark. Sometimes wildly.

But slowly, you could see that I started to zero in on a more solid vision–a vision of a fantasy world hidden in plain site in the water and ice. About three-quarters of the way through the series, I hit maximum creativity…then, in the last few images, you could see that I started to lose “the zen zone” again.

For me, I find this process to be a very warm and satisfying form of meditation.

Does it work similarly for you? How do you find your creative “zen zone”?

Welcome to 2016!