Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

This Uptown/Lyn-Lake institution is being subjected to change. There’s a new apartment building being assembled just East of it (you can see the scaffolding center). It’s new and exciting, but I’ll miss the previous building, a creepy gas station that sold milk by the “Galon”, I guess the extra “L” got in the way… for years. Let that be a lesson to you young-uns — learn to spell or they’ll knock you down and build luxury full-amenity apartments in your place.

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

Space Management - the art of arranging snow piles in a manner that allows for more snow. Sometimes so much snow falls here that it becomes an issue. The piles on the boulevards fall into the street, pushing the parked cars so far from the curb that the streets become narrow cow-paths. In the past, the city has declared one-sided parking for the season because the fire trucks can’t get down the street.

This pile of snow is actually fake. It was made with snow machines down by the lake, hauled in by dump trucks, laid down on the streets, and then a few days later scraped up and stacked here near the bike trail. OK, some nutter stacked the small pieces on top, but the whole pile of snow is a Minneapolis Parks Department creation.

Why? This is the long-term effect of the City of Lakes Loppet. That cross-county ski race that went through my neighborhood. They made a perfectly-groomed four-block-long trail right through uptown out of fake snow.

Yep, imported man-made snow in Minneapolis. As we Minneapolitains would say in the local dialect, “huh, that’s different.”

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

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

OK, time to brighten things up. I’ve been posting a lot of night pictures lately and though I like the colors and the mystical effects, it gets heavy with all that black. So today I bring you the ‘content’ of the Loppet: one of the races. This was the beginning of the kids race. If you have been to Uptown for the art fair, you know this place. That gray roof above the flag is the bus terminal on Hennepin. The skiers are on the boulevard by the Greenway (for the locals, it’s called The Mall). They actually haul in snow and cover the streets all the way to the lake.

This is the start and finish line for the kids race, they go out to the lake, circle around and come back.