Juwel

Just finished this portrait of a wonderful dressage horse named Juwel. The particular challenge with this commission was a photo with very little detail. Luckily I have met this gentleman in person a couple of years ago and had some other photos of him I could use. He was a pleasure do draw and I have learned a lot from him.

January 19th, 2007:

For a long while I thought Winter was never going to show up this year. Christmas came and went with barely a sprinkle of a couple of flakes three weeks before the holidays. The new year greeted us with rains, almost daily, for two weeks. And then, just a couple of days ago, the temperatures finally dropped. But the rain kept coming! Our first Winter storm was an ice storm.

As dangerous as it is for motorists and pedestrians, for an artist an ice storm is a delicious playground of light, colours, shapes and textures.

Just look at these. In the Fall they look brown and ugly but wrap them in a thin sheet of frozen water and they magically become little spiky jewels, encased in a glittering prison. Nature truly is magical. Even in Winter, when most of her children sleep, there is beauty and life!

I took my camera for a lunch break and had lots of fun photographing pretty much anything I could focus my lens on. Of course, there is always a price to pay - frozen fingers! It's hard to operate the shutter with mittens on. But I did get some wonderful shots though. Here are a couple more from that day. You can click on them to view larger images:


The night brings its own bag of surprises. While taking the dog out I was transfixed by an ice-covered tree beneath a street lamp. I decided to play with my camera again and see if I could get some nice photos. Tripod in hand and, again, freezing my buns and fingers off, I walked around our neighbourhood attracting many strange stares from passers by. My neighbours watched me from behind tightly pulled curtins. You'd think by now they'd be used to my "photoshoots". This first image is of a tree just a little down the street from our house. I feel I captured the magical look of it pretty well.



And then the light post and hydro cables, with tiny icycles hanging from them, attracted my attention:



Boy, I'm going to miss this in July when temperatures reach 30s (C) and humidity is 100%!