One happy baby enjoying his first day out in a snow covered, winter wonderland.

Back Story

After an unplanned “mental health” break last weekend, I was back behind the camera this past Saturday as the ‘ohana ventured out into the snow for our first winter snow portrait session.

And with the nearly unprecedented lack of snow so far this winter here in Chicago, it’s been a long wait to get out there do a shoot like this. While we were only shooting for 15 minutes, we had a blast and there were a ton of images to go through and edit afterwards.

All told, it was a great time that I can’t wait to do again. However, less than 72 hours after we were blessed with all this snow, the temps jumped above 40, the rains came and washed it all away – literally overnight. Bummer.

Guess it’s time to stalk the 10-day forecast again.

52 to Two Project

The above photo and the two below were also included as part of my weekly 52 to Two project.

Half Snow Angel

In the Bushes

Photo Shoot Photos

In addition to the photos added to the 52 to Two project, you can also see the rest of the images from this shoot in the Winter Snow Portraits gallery.

Here’s to wishing for the next big snowstorm and coming up with ideas for this week’s photo shoot as well.

– Kris

Photo: The view from our balcony after about 30 hours of snow. Isn’t it pretty?

Whenever we get one of those marathon snow systems here in Chicago where it snows non-stop for at least 18 hours, you can almost be guaranteed of three things when it finally stops:

1. There’s a ton of snow on the ground,
2. It’s going to be very frigid because all the moisture is out of the air,
3. and the clouds will be all but gone and it will be super sunny.

That was the case earlier this week, and I took the opportunity to setup on our balcony and catch this shot in the morning before it got too bright out.

It’s an HDR image of 3 exposures, which was necessary since I wanted to capture the blue sky in the background and the snow down below.  One of my HDR shots that doesn’t look like HDR, which is actually a big goal of mine.

- Kris

Photo: Looking out at a frozen winter wonderland of snow and icy water.

I shot this during the same early morning session as the image from yesterday. After freezing my tail off – and forgetting my gloves in the car – I headed inside to call it a morning. While in the stairway back up to our room, I saw this view out of the window and played around with how to give it an interesting look.

Photo: A pickup truck parked out on a frozen Europe Lake in Northern Door County, WI.

I captured this image while standing in the middle of a frozen lake up in Door County over the weekend. There were a few vehicles out there with adventurous ice fisherman braving the elements and enjoying a popular winter pastime in this part of the country.

Even though there were entire pickup trucks and minivans driving around on this ice, we were still a little leery about trekking out ourselves. Seeing as I grew up playing hockey my whole life, you’d think being out on a frozen lake would come natural, but playing it safe seemed to be the order of the day. Looking back, I almost wish I had brought my skates like I did the previous winter trip up north.

Photo: A look at the Stone Harbor Resort in Sturgeon Bay, WI from the Bayview Park located just on the other side of the water.

Let the darkroom work commence! Now that we’re back home from our latest road trip up north, it’s time to get cranking on processing and uploading all the photos I took.

This first shot is from a series I did on Saturday afternoon, about an hour before sunset. We’re looking East here towards the resort we were staying at this time. The park where this was taken is visible from the resort via my telephoto lens, so I had to scope it out on Google Maps and make the drive over there.

Can’t wait to come back to this spot during the warm summer months.

– Kris

Photo: Taken in Cave Point County Park last December during our trip up to Door County, WI.

While not nearly as bad as what New England received last week, we’ve had our fair share of snow this passed weekend here in Chicago. And while my wife prefers the warmth of Maui over the snowy Midwest winters, I for one am getting excited about our upcoming weekend trip to Door County come January.

More Hockey Photos Coming

If there’s one thing about winter that Cindy and I can agree on, it’s hockey. We had ourselves a doubleheader of hockey on Sunday. It started with last minute tickets to the afternoon matinee to the Chicago Wolves game against the Rockford Ice Hogs. Our seats were amazing, just 3 ROWS from the glass, just about at the defensive/offensive zone faceoff dot.

Other than realizing I really do need to rent a faster lens for these games, I managed to fill up 2 1/2 memory cards full of shots that I’m hoping to go through and post a few this week.

The second half of our doubleheader was watching the Hawks beat the Nashville Predators for the second straight night. While we weren’t at that game, it sure was an exciting one to say the least.

Be sure to keep an eye out for those soon, and to hold you over, check out the other hockey photos here at the blog and my new (and soon to be updated) Hockey Portfolio.

– Kris

In the typical short cycle of winter weather that we’re used to here in Chicago early in the season, the decent dumping of snow we received last week is just about gone thanks to slightly warmer temps and rain.

However, this was the scene outside of my office window earlier in the week. I’d say there were about a dozen Canadian geese outside trying to pick at whatever grass was still accessible while the blowing snow was still coming down steadily. I snapped this with my SX110 since our office frowns on setting up tripods with DSLRs and telephoto lenses on them next to the windows.

Any Relation?

I’ve seen these birds year after year but never really thought about grabbing a shot of one of them. That is, of course, when there’s a whole group of them crossing the street and stopping traffic.

Anyway, it was because we saw their somewhat-related cousins, the Nene bird, last September at the Maui Photo Festival. Here’s another shot of one of the distinct relatives, you can sort of see the resemblance, no?

I find it intriguing that these birds are found about 2,500 miles apart from each other, and how the Nene bird from Hawaii is considered such a rare bird in the wild (less than 1,000 as of 2004 per Wikipedia).

Leave it to me to find reminders of Maui is the oddest places during cold, Chicago winters.

Brrr doesn’t even begin to describe just how cold it is here in Chicago right now. On the way to lunch just now the car thermometer read 4° F as the air temp and it was well below zero with the wind gusts.

Whenever it gets this cold, it reminds of the Door County trip we took last December when it was that cold everyday (plus all the snow they were getting). In fact, it was a year ago this week. How time flies.

This photo was taken on one of our little excursions out into the cold, thanks to the great sunshine we had that let you believe it was warmer than it really way. We were trekking around Whitefish Dunes State Park and didn’t actually stay outside the car for more than 15 minutes or so. Since I practically grew up in a hockey rink, I have a better tolerance for the cold, but my lovely partner in crime has a different opinion.

All told, I think we stopped at 3-4 different places that day so that we I could get out and take some photos. If you’d like to see more, you can revisit last year’s post about our December Door Country trip.

One of my projects this weekend is to get together a collection of photos from our Door County trips for a 2010 calendar we’re putting together for someone as a xmas gift this year.

This probably won’t be one of them, but going through and browsing what I have on Flickr already, there’s a lot more editing that could be done to these shots first. There certainly is a big difference in what I know about Photoshop and other software than I did a year ago.

As winter here in Chicago approaches, I’ll have to make a point of going back to these old December shots and giving them a little post production love. Currently, the long term forecast for our area isn’t promising a lot of snow this year, so these may be the only frozen tundra shots I have.

I have hockey on the brain still, and for at least this morning, it’s Roller Hockey. This photo was taken back in the middle of December, but I’m hoping to make it out here today for a little bit of a workout during lunch.