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There are always interesting combinations to be found. What is most remarkable about this sort of thing is the way the mind can put pieces together that are widely disparate, which may not have been viewed for months. Software only helped find the physical location of the pieces, and then create the combo. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with making the mental connection in the first place.

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Some photographs are perfectly obvious upon viewing at any distance of time. The sunset was gorgeous, the animals were adorable, whatever. This one is more of a problem. What was the reason for the approach to the subject?

It wasn't the scenery I was looking at while wandering around in two feet of snow. The blanked out ground was erased from the composition, creating relationships between the visible elements that are not ordinarily evident. As mentioned previously, somewhat flippantly, I was most certainly attracted to the repaired crack in the concrete block wall, which signals movement of the ground beneath the corner of this building. It jags its way down the wall into the top of the fence, which leaves the two dimensional surface in an almost solid plane that turns 90 degrees and offers a barely opaque plane that disappears out of the frame, creating a tense imbalance. I think I actually saw all this while framing the view. And even more, that eludes me now, some three weeks after the fact.

For some other fascinating views of a walk in the snow, totally different from these, look at where Mauro Thon Giudici has been recently.

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I'd like to believe there is less of this sort of questioning going on as I do this photography thing longer. Surely if I can't figure out what I was after, there is little chance of demonstrating to anyone else what it was I was looking to display. Apparently I was "exercising my eye," but hadn't quite gotten warmed up yet. Ordinarily these kinds of exercises get edited out and shuffled into the contact sheet bin. Today I'm interested in the process of finding an image from a recent session that really works for me. We walk around and look and see, releasing the shutter any number of times, but only occasionally do we find subjects that really excite us. What is it that makes the spark?

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Better, but it's a fairly small crop from a 6 x 7 original. Couldn't get closer without trampling on the scene.

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Better still. But the spark didn't last, perhaps because I shortly after this went back inside, tired of struggling through knee high snow.

RDW; JHW; KMW; MoM in bkgnd

This is what we do on Christmas. Anybody want to share theirs?

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Better put this up, or it's not going to happen.

The night prior to this photo, it took 5-1/2 hours to get home from the market, a trip that ordinarily takes 15 minutes. It was truly a challenge to yours truly's sanity and patience. At least I wasn't one of the unfortunates who spent over 24 hours in their car, as some out there did. You might say people around here don't know how to handle their vehicles in the snow. Alas, 4-5 days later, we're still digging our way out of 24 inches of this white stuff.

Old news...Are we supposed to care?

The 3D sucked, and the flat version was cheesy. But otherwise the display technology was impressive. The "holiday" display in the Comcast headquarters, that is.

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Foregoing the expense of renting one of these, I opted to make a phone call to the building owner across the street, in order to gain access to his roof. It only took about two years to make the call. But the assistance I received was substantial. This allowed me to cross one more county off my list of 93 for the court house project, which leaves me with six unvisited counties, and another three with multiple buildings that haven't all been recorded. I'm going to cross them all off in 2010 - then start reshooting those with technical problems. And maybe rent that towable lift once or twice to see the tops of buildings like Bath, Highland, and Culpeper counties.

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Part of our "holiday" travels.