SNOW DAY

As the north thaw from a cold winter, Jennifer reflects on the images she made
during her Thanksgiving visit back home.  Shooting in harsh climatic weather
can be both frustrating and rewarding.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a snowfall, and so I was childishly excited about the  inch-and-a-half of snow that fell while I was in Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. I had forgotten how snow makes the landscape a soft, blank canvas where footsteps and errands get scribbled with black lines. The snow kept falling, but people in the neighborhood needed to keep up with their lives, going for a run or going to pick up kids at school. What I started to see in the snow was not the snow itself, but the blank spaces left by moving cars and people. No one stayed to enjoy the snow. Even the sky was empty, the sun seemingly just gone, the sky a blank gray. 

JKay

Point-and-Shoot

In January, Leica hosted a workshop at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens for owners of the company’s compact camera systems. I took my V-Lux 20 for a refresher course on all its functions and buttons.

Aside from giving tips on how to maximize the features on my camera, the Leica instructors advised us on how to use our “point-and-shoot” cameras to make pictures of the gardens. 

• Have a subject, and then give your subject room to move within the frame. 
• Get physically close to a subject, instead of relying on the camera’s zoom. Take advantage of the macro setting.
• Light coming from the side reveals texture in a subject.
• Play with the camera’s white balance to change the tone of an image.
• Odd numbers of things = interesting.

The workshop reminded me of how powerful my "little" camera really is, and I think I'll be taking it out of my camera bag more often. I'm particularly encouraged by a "high dynamic" setting I had forgotten, which produces images in high-contrast black-and-white.

Do you shoot with a point-and-shoot camera? What settings do you recommend? 

JKay