Last week started with Spring but ended with Winter. I took this shot early in the week and as of this morning everything was covered in a light blanket of snow again. It wont last long but I had my hopes up for a while there. Anyway this image is of the… I don’t know what to call it… early Spring colour? Left over Autumn colour? All the plants that had just been buried under the snow for the winter and turned brown are now uncovered and the new growth hasn’t turned things green yet. Sure it’s a bit dirty at first glance but when the light hits it just right it’s actually kind of pretty. #50WithA50

Winter is really in full retreat at the moment and most of the snow has melted. Where the snow has melted along the track I walked at lunch time there is a blanket of pine cones which I thought would make a good candidate for this weeks #50WithA50. I think I prefer using this lens for shots like this, up close to get detail with a shallow depth of field.

One of the best things you can do to keep learning in photography is join a local camera club. I’m a member of Camera35 here in St John’s and there is always new stuff to learn and talk about at the regular meetings. One of the other things they do is organize monthly photo outings and unfortunately I rarely get to go to those, weekends are always busy. However this weekend they organized a photo scavenger hunt on a Sunday afternoon and I was free. It was fun, especially since I took along more lenses than just my 50mm and tried to use each lens depending on what the topic was. Some were wide angle, some were zoomed in and some were shallow depth of field. For example this topic was “Starts with the letter M” so I found a red “Muster Station” sign and used a shallow depth of field (f2.2) to focus on the M. I went a touch too shallow since all of the M isn’t in focus but it still my favourite of the images I took with the 50mm last week so I thought I’d post it as this weeks post in my #50WithA50 challenge.

Not sure how many rules of good photography I broke to get this photo. I was walking along Rennies River trying to find something to shoot when I saw the rocks with the river flowing over them. Perfect for a long exposure, except I didn’t have a tripod and it was the middle of the day so it was too bright, I had no filters and even if I did none of the ones I have fit the 50mm lens and it isn’t stabilized so hand holding at lower speeds is not going to work. I ended up using a very high f-stop (f22) and a low ISO, over exposing way too much to get the motion blur in the water and propping the camera up on a bridge railing and shooting between car passing that caused the bridge to vibrate. It actually turned out better than I expected. Or perhaps I should say it turned out not as awful as I expected. #50WithA50

On Sunday we had large icicles hanging from eves and window but the sun came out with blue skies and started a melt. There were drops falling from each point and bump on the icicles and the wind was blowing the drops against each other. I took my camera and 50mm and tried to capture a shot with as many drops as possible. I’m sure the neighbours must have thought I was crazy standing there clicking away and missing most of the drops. Eventually I got one with several drops in frame. #50WithA50

We had a very cold and windy yet relatively dry period where there ponds froze over and the snow that fell on them tended to blow around and off the ice. It created interesting patterns, like clouds. This is one shot I took of some branches frozen in the ice and being battered by the wind and snow. The whispy waves of snow were constantly moving and changing as gusts of wind blew them through the shot. One second the ice would be clear, the next a flurry of snow would blow across inches above the ice and then it would be clear again. #50WithA50