“It’s beginning to look at lot like Christmas
Everywhere you go….”
(Meredith Wilson)
Living where there are four distinct seasons is a delightful thing; so many things catch your eye when the light and landscape continually shift in the seamless, effortless and circular annual pattern. Yet, in these final days of fall, when the daylight hours decrease to what will be their smallest number of the natural year, the grey, dismal gloom reaches its opposing peak and, for one who prefers outdoor photography, such a gluttonous serving of morose monotony is discouraging; it is frustrating, and sometimes it is decidedly depressing. In this part of our fair state we tend to have far fewer replete-with-potential-for-magical-images “White Christmases” than might be expected; indeed, it is more common to get a nice dump of snow early in the month and nothing else until January (unless you want to count the stereotypical ice storm that accompanies most New Years Eve celebrations). This often leaves our small corner of the world barren, stark, and rather dirty and forlorn by now and I find I am getting…well, yes, I hate to use the word but I am getting…bored.
‘Tis such a pity, these dank, dreary days, for the hawks are active and, along with the winter contingent of songbirds, very visible. And though it is still good photographic exercise to get out there in the bracing chill (read: finger, toe, and mind-numbing cold) and work at getting decent shots of them, grey after grey day yields little about which to write home. Let’s face it, one can only take so many morosely-lit photographs of squirrels, little birds, and perched hawks. So while out driving the past few days, it occurred to me to give my Self a photographic goal; to go after something a little different in order to rekindle my creative fires and push my limits at the same time.
I’m making a list and I’m checking it twice. Gonna find my way to some very nice seasonal displays that continue to catch my eye in what I’ll refer to as “The 12 Days of Christmas” project. Of course right at this moment my list contains all of 5 such places, but a couple of them have the potential to be spectacular if we’d only get one decent snowfall. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do about the other 7 days, and maybe in the end there won’t be 12 after all, but as I always say, you only fail when you don’t even try.
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