"Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see..."

Finally: The second full week of January brought the first big snow of the season for northeast Ohio. It started on a Monday evening and was still falling when I got up that Tuesday. "This is the day I go to the Valley to shoot," I told my husband.

Let me say frankly and right off the bat that I am not a landscapephotographer. I am a columnist, a print journalist and a           former newspaper reporter who learned photography by        watching other journalists takepictures of people and events. I have shot some nature photographer here and there, but     my abilities are nowhere near those of the pros who hang outin the Valley waiting for lakes to   freeze and eaglets to fly.   What I do have, I believe, is an eye for composition, a few     cameras and a  bursting desire to try my hand at something  new. And so, on that blustery Tuesday in January, I made sure I had batteries and memory cards for my old D-80, outfitted with my 60-mm 3.5 macro lens; my D-750 with my 70-200 2.8; and my D-700 with my 24-70 2.8.  I pulled on my Keens. And we took off for parts unknown -- literally.

"Where do you want to go?" my husband asked as we pulled deeper into the Valley. All this brown and gray and white. "I don't know," I said. I hate to say that it all looked the same, but it did, until, "OK, pull over at that bridge." I can't tell you the name of the bridge. All I know is that it was on Majors Road near Oak Hill. As my husband sat with the car idling on the roadside, I tromped across the woods to the bridge. It was a pretty hoop bridge, red and brown. I got some close-ups with the curve of the wood in the foreground and the bulk of the bridge faded in the background. I got some wide angles of the whole bridge. I started to go back to the car, but as I shot, with snow falling anew, and my body warm and cozy in just the right outerwear (which can be an issue for a Southerner), the inspiration showed up. I started seeing beyond the drab colors, finding beauty in composition and images I might have overlook on another day when I'm not taking the time to pay attention, including ice formations on the river below the bridge.

My husband ended up getting out of the car
and joining me.

We walked across the bridge after that, and up the path in the sweet, lightly falling snow, to find the Hunt Farm, an old white farmhouse turned visitors'  center, where my kids did Junior Ranger programs in the summer. This was beautiful in the snow, white on white, with its white outbuildings and large expanse of yard, now covered in snow. I shot a bit of the house and the out structures, and then a spot of red caught my eye in the snow under a large tree. It was a cardinal, which has always been good luck, as it represents my mother, who died 11 years ago. (Even if a red cardinal is always male.) I was so startled and taken, and I wasn't quick enough to get much. Ah, but then it was just good to know I'd seen a cardinal on this first day of winter's snow in the Valley.

I love this little house and the surrounding property.

From there, we drove on to the covered bridge on Everett Road.

As we drove along, my eyes opened and narrowed. Instead of a mass of brown and gray, I saw specific plants in the meadows. I began to see beauty around every turn, even as the colors were only so muted and drab. Sometimes a peek of blue would appear in the skies.

~~~

Well-meaning people have often said to me over the years as they watch me with my camera: "Don't you want to be in the moment?"
"Oh," I say, "I am most in the moment when I am photographing."

I'm very excited to be doing this project.

Thanks for reading. Happy new year.

-DLH

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