A winter of... meh

Taken with the Bronica S2a with a 75mm Nikkor-P lens with an orange contrast filter on Ilford HP5 Plus.

Last year I wrote at length of my photographic revelry during the winter of 2015, a year in which Lake Erie came very near to freezing over completely. I noted how winter, at least at my latitude, can transform a landscape that was feeling a bit photographed out into something altogether fresh, and how I was therefore looking forward to what the winter of 2016 would bring. Well, it looks like for the most part El Niño put the kibosh on that idea as Winter really only put in a few token appearances this year. 

I was perhaps being a bit too optimistic in my hopes that this year would be anything like last. El Niño aside the consistently frigid temperatures of the previous year certainly seem to have become more the exception than the rule these days. But although the ground remained conspicuously un-snow-covered much of the time, there were still those token appearances, temperature drops lasting the better part of a week that, while they were too brief to produce the grand ice desert landscapes of the previous year, did bring about a few situations that wouldn't occur at any other time of year.

Case in point is the image up top. The glazed structure in question is part of concrete remains of the long abandoned Erie Beach Amusement Park that is my default destination when I'm not up for a drive out of town and don't have any better ideas. The doorway here leads into a sort of concrete room of sorts that served who knows what purpose back in its day, which is at one corner of a sort of sea wall that encloses about a hectare now overgrown with trees and cat-tails for, again, who knows what purpose. On brighter days it's possible to see to the bottom of this "room" to a floor of rocks and broken concrete, along with the occasional beverage containers and other artifacts suggesting periodic exploration by those presumably much younger than I. Photographically it's always been a bit of a challenge to me in that it seems like something that should be more interesting than any of the images of it I've come away with.

On this day however the combination of strong winds and a particularly brutal (at least in context of this winter in general) snap of cold had transformed its gratified concrete walls into something other-worldly.  In a colder year in fact it's something that wouldn't have happened at all as it wouldn't have been possible for the wind to spray the surface with water, which then froze, had the surface of the lake been frozen over. Those wild conditions had happened the night before. Things were nice and calm the next day when I got there, a few somewhat eerie clouds having moved in to compliment the mood. As you can no doubt guess rendering them as such required no small amount of burning in, accomplished here via Photoshop as the darkroom has become temporary storage through the winter while work has been going on elsewhere in the house. I'm guessing this is something a lot of home darkroom practitioners out there would relate to.


If the story of cold combined with strong winds on Lake Erie coating things with ice this passed winter sounds familiar it may be due to an image that widely circulating around the internet last January depicting a car frozen in place and completely covered over in a layer of ice. This happened in Buffalo NY, just across the way from me and, surprise, was the result of the same set of circumstances that gave that car its frosty coating. I somehow doubt that my image will make its way around the internet to the same extent. It's a shame too because, while I'm admittedly biased, I think mine is the better photograph.