what was I thinking? (pt. 54b)

During our recent blizzard, despite my claims that I was never leaving the house again, the morning after my commutation ordeal I did indeed leave the house: long enough to carry a camera a distance of some quarter mile to observe whatever was (not) happening at the "center of town" and expose two rolls of film. On my way, there were some oddities that caught my attention. Looking at the exposures now, I wonder what I had in mind at the time. Maybe it was the cracks in the wall? Shapes in the starkness of the landscape? Or was it the snow on the fence? No, there's hardly any snow on the fence... It was the fence and the crack in the wall and the abstraction created by the two feet of snow. Yeah, that must be it. Whatever...

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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.