"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Four Days To Christmas: Winter Solstice

From On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation by Alexandra Horowitz:

“It was December twenty-first, the winter solstice. The business of being a pedestrian in the city had changed: any mosey that crept into people’s summer gait had been replaced by the determined fast stride of the winter walker. It was cold out, and I hunched my shoulders in a futile attempt to warm my ears and bully the chill away.”

From Winter Sunshine by John Burroughs:

“[It] may be later in the season, well into December. The days are equally bright, but a little more rugged. The mornings are ushered in by an immense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A broad bar of red and orange lies along the low horizon, surmounted by an expanse of color in which green struggles with yellow and blue with green half the way to the zenith. By and by the red and orange spread upward and grow dim, the spectrum fades, and the sky becomes suffused with yellow white light…”

Summer, Fall, Winter: Three Galleries

Since rebooting Flickr last year with a couple thousand reprocessed and new photos, I keep a small portion of one eyeball cued into what gets viewed, liked, and commented on. It’s always fun to see what people are interested in, partly because I like to puzzle about different preferences, how people see the photos, what they like, and how that varies from my own perspective. There’s a certain randomness to it of course — as there is with just about everything we do on social sites, including blogs — yet in that randomness there can certainly be some found-surprises.

The three galleries below show the twenty most liked photos, which — as I assembled them for this post — realized could be organized into three seasons: summer, fall, and winter, a little sample of my photography covering three quarters of a yearly progression. New photos of spring buds are just a few weeks away, at which time this top twenty will likely drop off the Flickr stats page, so I thought I would capture the current crop and share them here.

Many of the photos in these galleries have appeared on this site before, but some have not. If you would like to see the full Flickr albums the photos came from, here are the links.

Georgia: Grant Park Atlanta Fall Color
New York: Ausable Chasm
New York: Northern Landscapes
New York: Whiteface Mountain Region
New York: Winter Scenes

Thanks for reading and taking a look!





Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 3 of 3)

From the essay “House-Warming” in Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau:

“The snow had already covered the ground … and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me….”

“At length the winter set in in good earnest … and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then.”

The gallery below contains the last of three sets of photos I took in the days following a snowstorm in northern New York.

The previous sets in this series are here:

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 2 of 3)

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3)

Enjoy the photos!

Bye for now……………….. ๐Ÿ™‚

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 2 of 3)

From The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones by Alfred Watkins:

“The winter, with its light of low elevation, and with an absence of leaves, is by far the best season, and the lovely December day โ€ฆ gave an opportunity long hoped for.”

“[The] absence of leaves on trees, winter is by far the best time of year for a certain type of explorationโ€ฆ.  Sun shining on one side and very low down is an ideal condition.”

The gallery below contains the second of three sets of photos I took in the days following a snowstorm in northern New York.

The first set in this series is here: Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3).

The irresistible Ford truck partly buried in the snow made an earlier appearance on this site, in a different season, here: Before and After: Swamp Things.

Thanks for taking a look!