Stark.

It’s been a cold, white winter. Many people have been complaining about it, and I suppose I can understand this intellectually even if my own reactions to winter are drastically different.
The way some people speak of snow and cold is the same as how I talk about glaring sun and heat in the summer.
I took the Mamiya 645 out to play a couple of weeks ago. The sun was bright and it was very very cold – exactly the kind of weather that invigorates me. The camera, however, had other ideas and the cold made the shutter operate slower than I was asking it to do. I ended up with very overexposed pictures that seemed at first to be unusable. The shots above were somewhat ‘salvaged’ with adjustment of shadow, midtone, and highlight levels, the same way some people try to wring some kind of enjoyment out of an otherwise unpleasant situation.

This next one, however, seemed resistant to any efforts to ‘improve’ it.

Then I realized that I didn’t even want to change it. I love everything in this photo that most people would say was wrong with it. So instead of fighting it, I embrace it just as unapologetically as I embrace winter.