January Image of the Month

A new year has started; I'm looking forward to working on continuous improvement in my photography. This month has been a bit quiet, both in terms of number of outings and photos taken. In some ways this is a deliberate choice; trying to be more thoughtful about my intentions, rather than shooting anything that I come across. That said, I still want to be open to serendipity. I've done some macro work I'm quite pleased with, though they aren't as popular as other work.

There's really only 5 photos in contention this month. So there are the two runners up, and you can decide for yourself which is first and second. I'm pretty sure that most people will like the landscape more than the abstract macro, but some will love the burst of colours. Abstracts are difficult for some people; if they don't know what they are looking at, they don't know if they like it or not. This is a bubble in a glass paperweight, if you missed the explanation first time around.

Landscapes and cats are safe subjects for popularity, but that's not why I'm doing this whole photography thing. I'm looking for images that call to me. Sometimes the multiple layers in a landscape, or the colours, or shapes, textures, or lines. I'm big on reflections and haven't done much of that lately.

And the winner! This is in east Fish Creek. I had wondered if that lonely tree would make a good photographic subject, and was in almost the right place at the right time. That sky! I'm standing on a path, and really, I should have trudged through the knee deep snow to move in a few yards and over to the right a bit. That would have got the telephone poles out of the photo. I played with cropping them out of this image, and didn't like that composition.