I am traveling today. Already at the airport on my way eventually to Las Vegas for a week of work.  This shot is from yesterday. On Thursday we got six inches of snow. Then on Friday we got rain. Then it turned cold. The snow has a thin crust of ice so that it looks like someone polished the landscape. This HDR treatment of the point at Roger’s Pond along the Mousam River shows off the contours of the snow surface.

Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent. Program with iContrast and -1/3 EV exposure compensation. 

Processed in Dynamic Photo HDR and Lightroom.

And for the Sunday thought: the polished contours of the snow  obscure all the messy details of a living landscape, reducing the scene to its basic shapes, teasing the light into sculpting a different kind of world for the eye. Clean, cold, pure. Not a landscape we would want to live with forever, but refreshing in small doses. In the spirit it represents a certain state of mind that sometimes comes in meditation. One of the states of mind. Again nothing we would probably want to live with long term, but refreshing in small doses.

When I got back home, after taking this shot, I brewed a pot of tea and sat down to the computer to process. I attempted to get a bit of the clarity and simplicity into the finished image, using some of the most sophisticated and complex software in existance. And so it is in the spirit. A moment of clarity to illuminate our complex lives.