Winterlude

Winterlude is an annual winter event in Ottawa, featuring ice sculptures, performances, and other seasonal activities. The Urban Group of the RA Photo Club organized an outing to photograph this event, and I was among a dozen or so members that participated. For some reason, mid-February weather can be quite unpredictable in Ottawa. Some days are biting cold, while others are well above freezing. Needless to say, warm days aren’t friendly to ice sculptures! The day of the outing was one of the warm days, and while the ice sculptures were still reasonably intact, it was very slushy and not ideal for a winter festival. Nevertheless, I persevered and still came away with some interesting shots.

The horse sculpture was quite large, but I was most interested in the head and its beautiful blue colour.

For this sculpture, I chose to take a very tight shot of just the bear's face, and I enhanced contrast in post processing to bring out its features.

If you love reflections as I do, the Shaw Centre is a wonderful building to photograph. Here, I've combined the real (foreground) with the surreal (reflections).

This is a tiny detail of a very large sculpture, where I've concentrated on the swirls enhanced by the coloured lighting.

I found this to be an interesting combination of subjects: one natural and delicate, and the other human-made and hard.

While it's just snow thrown against a wooden structure, I found the pattern and combination of textures interesting.

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