Welcome to the first Bloggography challenge! Last week, after the first issue of Bloggography, Manic Mother and I gave you a challenge. We challenged you to get out and take a Winter-themed picture in any mode other than full auto. How did it go?

This past week has been freezing in my neck of the woods. Bitterly cold. And I got sick. The hacking, aching, stay-in-bed-all-day kind of sick. So it wasn’t until Saturday that I was out of the house and caught site of what I wanted to photograph for this week’s theme. I was on my way to the mall with KitKat to make Christmas returns and exchanges (a relatively tortuous few hours, I must say). We drove past a lake that is just around the corner from where we live and and saw that the lake was half frozen. Hundreds of Canadian Geese were sitting on the snow-covered ice in the lake, and several dozen were swimming in the not-quite frozen water at the edge of the ice.

I kicked myself for not having a camera with me, but I hoped that the geese would return the next day so that I could catch them with my camera.

They were there when I went back, but there were not quite so many of them. And the view from the edge of the lake was not half as striking as the view from the road above, where I had been when I initially saw them. Regardless, I thought it made quite the interesting Winter scene.

Canon 40D & Tamron 28-75mm lens, ISO 160 – 51mm – f/8.0 – 1/500 sec (used P mode)

I zoomed in a little so that you can see that it really is geese out there on the snow, ice, and water.

Canon 40D & Tamron 28-75mm lens, ISO 160 – 75mm (zoomed in on my computer) – f/7.1 – 1/500 sec (used P mode)

On my way home from picking up KitKat’s antibiotic today (it’s the season’s first case of strep! Woohoo!) the sky was breathtaking. It was about 11:00 in the morning, the sky was a deep blue, and the entire skyline in one direction was striped with what I’m assuming are con-trails from airplanes. They couldn’t be naturally formed clouds, could they? I saw it first while stopped at a stoplight and cursed both my windshield and the powerlines in the way. I drove another block and a half and lost site of the sky, buried behind tall buildings. I approached another stop light and the view opened up again. I shouted to KitKat to roll down her window, leaned over her, snapped this picture, and then had to speed away. The light had turned green.

Canon 40D & Tamron 28-75mm lens, ISO 160 – 56mm – f/13 – 1/1250 sec (used landscape mode)

Now it’s your turn! Please leave your link in the MckLinky below and be sure to link back to us (either with a text link or a button). We’d love to have you add your pictures to our Bloggography flickr group, too. I’ve been so excited to see people adding pictures there already! Next week, come back for another tutorial and another challenge…..and Manic Mother and I will be featuring a few of our favorite pictures from this week’s challenge in two weeks!

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Related posts:

1. Bloggography Challenge – Focus
2. Bloggography Challenge – Lenses
3. Bloggography Challenge – Aperture
4. Bloggography Challenge – ISO