the colors of winter...

i am not a fan of being cold but i absolutely love the beauty of winter...

the world changes from one day to the next.

and instead of just the winter whites (which i LOVE), 

there are 50 shades of gray...

soft muted greens...

pastel sunrises...

browns and blues and 

feathers and seed pods...

there isn't enough time in a day to see it all.

and tomorrow,

it's going to be different :)

 it truly is a winter wonderland out there

   

  

going green :)

 

spring is just a tease this year. 

it is coming, but the wait has been hard on everyone. 

it may not have been the roughest winter we've had,

but i believe it might be one of the longest.

 

so yesterday, i went looking for a little piece of spring, looking for anything green and found, instead, some beautiful pussy willows...

 

 

i never saw pussy willows in the wild, only in a store, so it was a sweet find :)

but there really was no green. 

 

so i went back home and dug into the photo archives

and found just enough spring there to hold me over....

 

 

explore...

my word for 2013 is explore...

i am excited about it, it already has made an impact and it feels like it could make me stretch in a lot of different ways this year...

on friday morning, i went to the sunrise at the river like i do as often as i can.
i feel like i have photographed every bit of this little road along the river,
yet it calls me back day after day, season after season...

friday, i purposely 'explored' different angles,
and played with my macro lens.
i drove through the field instead of staying on the road, exploring a different section of the floodplain.  all in all, a great friday morning,
thanks to my new word...
 

 

 

 

then, on saturday morning, when i was driving to the river,

again the word 'explore' made its impact. 

i turned around and drove AWAY from the river,

and explored somewhere different for the sunrise.

i used to go to different places all the time but so fell in love with my secret river road that i've spent easily six months going there almost every day. 

by exploring some place different, two days in a row, i found beauty i was missing.

 thank you, my new word-for-2013,

you already are more than i could have hoped for...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

some images were enhanced with snapseed, some with kim klassen's textures....

a gray day...

everywhere i looked,

there were different shades of gray...

i think i counted 50 shades :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sidenote - oddly enough, on the day that the photo challenge was 'something gray,'

the world cooperated with a gray day. 

i decided to stop at a cemetery after shooting at Gray's Beach on the cape

and see if i could get gray headstones. 

i took a bunch of pics and spooked myself -

not the best idea since i am here alone at the cape -

but when i went home and uploaded the images,

i realized that this headstone was honoring a woman named Rebecca Gray. 

 

so on this day, 10/2/12, almost 150 yrs after she died,

on 'something gray' day,

i too honor Rebecca Gray  :)

and another odd thing - i JUST realized that the texture i used to enhance the gravestone shot was kim klassen's 'partings'   it all comes together sometimes, doesn't it :)