I love visual arts, and in particular paintings and sculptures (aside from photography). Impressionists like Monet, Sisley, Manet  are, in my opinion, amazing. I love looking at paintings from impressionists at museums and look at those paintings close up and then far away.

We had a recent (and way too early) snow fall in Saint Paul. Amy and I went out for a walk and I brought my camera. I decided to use a long focal length to accentuate the snow and also render the majority of the images out of focus. So I had in this case this vision in mind of a somewhat impressionist scene.

Below are some of the images.

Those images somehow speak to me as they tell a story, create some sort of a mood and visually the color contrast and the out of focus rendering makes it interesting to me.

I love the mystery the out of focus areas do create, while we still recognize some of the image. Similar to impressionist paintings.

I think this is in part why I love Saul Leiters work so much, as he does a lot of abstraction, works with color and with layers. These images may not have as many layers as his, but the snow does help with creating more 3-dimensionality and depth (a topic I’d like to focus on in a future podcast).