Alright... so it has worked for now. I said I'd blog today, yesterday... and I actually made it happen! 9:30PM... Shhh... shit is not easy... as you can see from my sporadic blog posts here in the past. That being said, I'm going to try to get at this a handful of times a week, and perhaps get this going as a daily thing.
First things first, shout out whoever is here reading this, I appreciate you, it is weird writing this to essentially no one, so, when I figure out who has been here and who hasn't I can kind of tailor it to the audience that is here. If anyone has suggestions on what to write about, questions that I can answer, anything of that matter feel free to comment here, or on Instagram. It would be a huge help in getting me to stay on top of this thing, and it would make it more fun in general. If not... it will just be me blabbering on to myself... not interesting.
Saturday morning in Winnipeg was gorgeous! I'm going to need to give my girlfriend a quick shout out for getting my lazy ass up when I was sleeping through my alarm. HUGE ASSIST. I must not have been feeling heading out shooting as much as I thought I would be the night before, but when I peaked out the window and saw everything covered in snow, I was instantly stoked.
Friday night I got my plan together for sunrise, I google mapped a few places around the city to hit up, and the place I decided to start at was St. Vital Park. I had never been through the park before, so I didn't really know what to expect when I got there, I just knew I was looking for a "lake" with two little islands. The original idea obviously included the sunrise, but with the trees looking amazing because of the snow, it worked out that it was cloudy.
One of my favourite things about photography is that spark that you get when you get a photo you're super into when all your preparation falls into place. This was that shot yesterday morning, and I just wanted to get moving to all of the other spots I had some ideas for. The next place for me was the St. Boniface Cathedral. My original idea that I had been wanting to try for months was framing the skyline in the hole in the cathedral during a sunset (facing west). On a morning like this however, I had something better! This snow looked insane...
Well... sometimes your ideas don't really work out as envisioned. I'm not really into it! I donno, maybe it works, but it's just not what I had in mind. I don't like the metal in the top of the frame, I don't like the rectangle thing in the bottom of the frame. The trees end up blocking the downtown view, and the whole image just feels a little unbalanced to me. I decided I would get a little higher of an angle to try to get the skyline in the frame, and keep the cross at the apex of the cathedral in the foreground instead of "the hole".
This was better to me. It showed off the snow and colours in the trees way better than the other angle, and it provided some natural leading lines in the architecture. The walkway brings your eye to the diagonal of the cathedral wall, to the cross, to the bridge, the skyline and the museum. It works way better as a whole in my opinion and is much more balanced.
The moral of the story, is, sometimes the original idea you may have for a photograph may not turn out exactly as expected, but having an idea or concept in the first place is what puts you in the position to succeed, and make something you love.