Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

I took this picture when I was downtown with Bub Kupbens earlier this year. That’s me and Bob below, from below. The other picture I liked from that day was posted earlier.

I thought of this picture while “reflecting” on the end of the year. It’s been the year of photography from me. Though I have been shooting since I was a pup, I never really felt free in the medium. As a kid, I had to process my own pics in the family print shop dark room or pay to process the color. That problem existed all the way up until my first digital camera. I still catch myself hesitating over whether a shot is “worth it” before I snap the shutter. After I got the first digital I was concerned about disk space and CF card space (first card was 128m).

This year I moved to my 4th digital. A Nikon D200. A real camera! High quality images, full SLR — just like all my film cameras but with instant feedback, no shutter lag, 3 frames per second, no waiting for the card reader. Now that I have over a terabyte of storage, I don’t care about disk space and with Adobe Lightroom (awesome program) processing is a lot of fun and doesn’t eat off your fingerprints.

I’ve been shooting semi-professionally for years and have art-directed as a designer for dozens of CD covers, but now it is fun again. Discovering the daily photo blogging community has really helped. I started my blog because one of my clients, Paul Fricke, hired me to integrate a blog into his new website that I built. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but after taking a four-day photography workshop with Chris Marquart, I decided to post my pics. It has kept me shooting and learning all the time. The encouraging comments I receive from this friendly community are so helpful in keeping me going and growing. I’ve even met some of you and enjoy talking with others who are so passionate about the craft I love.

This new year I plan on expanding my the photography side of my business. Has photo blogging helped you to earn a living as a photographer? If it has, let me know (leave a comment or contact me). If you know of any links about this, that would be great as well. Otherwise, I am happy just doing this to test my skills and find new challenges. I can’t believe that I am coming up on my 100th post — time flies.

Another ‘perk’ of this project is that I write all my posts from the Caribou Coffee Shop by me and have gotten to know the great people who work there and a few of the regulars.

It has been a great year of discovery, stick around, tomorrow is ‘theme day’ at Daily City Photo Blog and the theme is “Best Photo of the Year 2007.” I’ll also post my top ten picks.

Thank You for reading, commenting and just being there and making me feel part of this great community.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

From a little earlier in the season, but I like the color of the willows.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Be careful with your composition, you never know when a pleasant sitting room could become an angry clown.
This photo was taken at the Northern Aire Resort I photographed a couple weeks ago. The other posts from there were: Magestic Pine Northern Morning, Cold North Lake and Night Time in Wisconsin.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Remember way back in the fall when I said that you better enjoy the colors because soon there will be only one? Well, here you go. This photo is from about the same area. It’s not black & white, well, at least I didn’t remove the color.

The land without color is now in full swing. Living here at this time brings out the sensitivity for subtlety. It’s like going from being a sugar junkie to a wine connoisseur. Winter brings a palette of softness and fine details. A quick glance for something striking will come back empty, but taking a moment to look across a frozen landscape will reveal the marvel of nature, not only to remain beautiful, but to survive.

What caught my eye here were the islands and the far shore. I love how they get less visible as they recede. I was trying to get a view through the trees without climbing through the snow when I realized that instead of getting the trees out of the way, I could plop one dead-center. This is usually something that I go to great lengths to avoid. Dead-center subjects are usually a compositional snoozer, but the tree isn’t the subject, the shorelines are. By placing that tree right in the middle, it grabs your attention right away. But then you see the shores and try to see around the tree. I find it comical that when I look at this picture I keep swaying my head from side to side trying to see around the tree.

More subtlety is on it’s way today, but supposedly only a couple of inches.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

I wanted to add some color to this gray morning, so I went back and found this little guy and his brother. One morning in August, I heard all this commotion coming from out my widow and went out to investigate. Something from the night got caught up a tree when the sun came up. I watched these little devils for an hour and took over 200 pics — gotta love digital. They shuffled around the tree and eventually came down on their own and high-ring-tailed it back to the woods across the street.

Processing this picture was unusual. Because of the harsh morning light, they were in high contrast and with the shadows all over in the tree I had to reduce the contrast & saturation and brighten the midtones. All the things I normally, only backwards.

Thanks for all the great comments over the holidays, I was out visiting family the whole time. I got up early each day and posted, but after that, had little time go looking at other photo blogs. Hopefully I’ll get some time this week. If you aren’t familiar with the daily city photo blog concept, go check this out and see the world!

This snow-covered bench sits in the quite little park across the street from the Harriet Rose Garden. I love to spend time at this park at all times of the year. It is a nice reflective place with a wonderful Japanese garden. It has little bridges and sculptures surrounded by shaped trees and flowering shrubs. I believe that there is a plack somewhere that explains the sister city relationship with Hiroshima as well. But I’ll have to wait for the spring thaw to update you on that.
Enjoy the peaceful Christmas aftermath; find a bench in a park and reflect on the new year.

Merry Christmas!

Just in time for Christmas. I ran out and grabbed a few pictures of the snow as it fell. It was sticking nicely on the trees and everything else. This is the Lake Harriet band shell. Very beautiful place in the summer and there are performances almost every day through the summer, but I had it all to myself today. Lake Harriet is part of the Chain of Lakes including Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. I live by Isles, so that’s the one I take the most pictures of.

Thanks for the well wishes for a safe trip on Saturday. I used up my luck and karma points. About seventy miles north of home I spun out and went in the ditch. Neither my sister or I were hurt and even the Jeep got out unscathed. I did need to be towed out; we ended up at the bottom of a very steep ditch on the edge of a lake, so it was a little unnerving. Several cars all went in at the same time, one went in right ahead of us and everyone hit the brakes, I did too and started fish-tailing. Wild ride going off the highway backwards into the snow in the dark. We decided to hold off going to Chicago on Sunday, opting for this morning. There were dire snow and wind warnings for the length of Wisconsin Sunday and we didn’t want to tempt fate.

Merry Christmas and may all of you other traveling fools have a safe and boring holiday trip. Remember, turn into the slide.

Today’s forecast for Minneapolis is “wintery mix” — is that a word? Wintery? It sounds so cheerful: Let’s gather around the fire to tell fond stories and share some eggnog & wintery mix.

In actuality, it’s all forms of winter precipitation: snow, sleet and rain. A slushy mess that is almost impossible to drive on — for everyone else, I have a jeep. So I’m dashing off my post for the day before my sister and I head north to Grand Rapids to visit Grandma. Hopefully it will be over the river and through the woods, not through the river and into the woods.

So if you don’t see a post from me tomorrow, send out the dogs.