I evidently hibernate in winter (my last post being nearly a month old now), but my friend and fellow photographer, Doug Stremel, and I ventured out early Wednesday morning for a day filled with finding images in the winter Kansas landscape. It’s a season that I don’t shoot enough but am striving to photograph more often. Winter was the favorite season for my college painting instructor, Robert Sudlow. I remember him once telling me that he had difficulty painting Kansas landscapes in summer because it was just “too green”. He found more subtlety and variation on those grey, overcast days when the snow was melting away. I’m understanding the beauty of that subtlety more and more myself as I continue to update my Kansas image files.

A different destination drew Doug and I out on Wednesday (more on that in the next post) but it wasn’t in a place that would work well at sunrise so we looked for another, nearby spot to take advantage of first light. Since water effectively doubles your sunrise impact by reflecting the colors, we headed for the Kansas River. Hiking down to the water’s edge in near total darkness provided its own challenge, but it was worth it when the light came up to reveal the melting ice flows. We heard them before we could see them, crashing into one another as they drifted downstream.

The shot at the top of this post is, I believe, the second frame I’ve shot in 2013.

As the sun rose, the colors shifted dramatically and offered a fantastic range of photo options. The following photo was taken about 35 minutes after the first and both are fairly true to the actual colors we were seeing.

This is also an HDR shot (High Dynamic Range) assembled from three separate bracketed captures spanning six stops. The process allowed me to get a much wider range of contrast into one image, something that was more and more necessary as the sun rose higher — getting brighter — while the foreground shadows remained very dark. I don’t like to push HDR as far as some do to get that other-wordly effect that so many relate to the process but, instead, I like to use it to get closer to what the scene actually looked like to my eye at the time of capture.

There were also plenty of options for detail shots of the melting ice along the river bank. All-in-all, a good start to the day, and a great start to 2013. I’ll continue with more of Wednesday’s locations in the following post.