This photograph is one of my favorites from December. Fall seemed to end early in Northeast Ohio. It’s one of the most beautiful times of the year here, and always seems to end too soon, but this year especially. I was glad that because I was taking pictures every day, I got to see so much of it!
Rain, wind, and I think a little hail, started knocking the leaves down and blowing them away, long before I was ready to say goodbye.
In that gray dusk of the year when sunset of fall color is over, but winter hasn’t arrived, I found some remarkable things. It’s always possible, but this snowfall was welcome.
First a dusting, then a sheet, then a thick down blanket of snow. I got this picture toward the end of the fluffy stage, before warm temperatures rounded and clumped the flakes together, and ultimately melted it into the river.
To me, good art is an invitation to meditate. I try to make images that will help you find something good to dwell on for a moment.
I hope you get a chance to do that today somehow. Maybe right now for just 10 seconds. These images are each moments in my own renovation. It’s serious and backed by science. Research is showing that images of nature help with stress and even recovery in hospitals. I think it would be cool if I could share that with someone else.
So let me take you there. The air is cool and humid, but not freezing. When you breathe in, you smell the clean smell of snow. In the middle distance behind you you can hear a stream running over rocks. All around you are these trees.
The snow on this fallen log is soft as a marshmallow. As you sit here, the breeze just starts to move the tree tops. Clumps of snow drop from the branches. You hear them patter on the ground around you.
That’s what it was like.
(In fact, one clump of snow fell directly onto my lens while taking this picture. Fortunately not the glass.)
You could sit here for a while, but it won’t stay like this for very long. The light will change, the snow will fall from the trees and melt. Tomorrow at this time, it would be hard to get here, and totally different.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter for more images. And I hope you come back soon.