Dark Ice

Hi, I’m Johanna and I write Seeing. I share my photography and writing here. I like to revel in the beauty of life and learn and explore. This is a space for calm and beauty, deep feelings and deep thoughts.

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Do you like winter? Do you enjoy when it’s crisp and cold out? When the cold has gotten to your bones and you come back inside and everything all of a sudden is warm and cozy?

Growing up in the alps, I used to hate winter. Six months of ice and snow in my childhood turned me off it for a long time. Now, I’m slowly warming up to the colder months.

A Winter’s Day in Black and White

It was crisp and cold here during the Christmas holidays. So cold, in fact, that one of the lakes in our area froze over. Magical!

When I went to experience this winter wonderland, it opened up like a scene out of an illustration in an old-timey children's book. Knolls of people in colourful clothing were ice skating all over. There were toddlers pulled on sleighs by their parents, families with strollers for baby’s first outing, and gaggles of children chasing each other at hair-raising speeds. It was lovely!

Walking around on the ice, I was fascinated. All this human activity and merriment had left layers of patterns on the cold glaze of the lake. Much to the chagrin of the people I was with, I spent most of our time there staring at the ground, snapping away.

It was a world within a world!

The hyper intense black and white brings out the patterns and markings even more.

So many tracks to read from.

This one I liked in particular. It looks like a Picasso rendering of a cloudy sky.

I had a lot of fun taking these photos. It was a meditative process to keep looking and finding these scenes, to go deeper and deeper into this particular moment in time at this particular place.

The mountains in my area are sometimes imposing, ominous looking. As if they whispered to you to get close, but not too close. This image captures the feeling well for me. I feel things very deeply and sometimes struggle to express the breadth and depth of my perception. Photography helps with that a lot.

When the sun set, I caught the last moments of the last light of the day. I visited the lake shortly before the beginning of the new year. Despite the contrast and darkness in the photos, they felt hopeful to me - the proverbial silver lining on the horizon.

Have a lovely day,

Johanna

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