uncommons

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I have such a love/hate relationship with winter in St. Louis.  Maybe the few years working in Florida warped my sense of seasonal regularity.  See, I love cold days with crisp midwestern evening light painting a pastoral landscape.  When sun reflects off a fresh snowfall, I am heaven bound.  However, when clouds envelope and snow falls from the skies, the city imbues a flat set of hazy gray tones and I become glum and somber.  When the snow fell this week and a sinus infection wore me down, our assignment editor and I came up with the idea to ride the local Metrolink rail and shoot a cold-weather essay on snow by rail.

I chose black and white for simplicity and consistency. Lately I have been learning towards it because it frees me from the color and graphic constraints that my mind constantly analyzes.  It lets me let go and play, since I have the bad habit of overanalyzing frames instead of actually shooting.  By combining a very simple piano piece by Kevin MacLeod and letting the piece extend a little longer than normal multimedia work, I hope to communicate a piece that is as much of St. Louis in the winter as my own emotional and behavioral response to it. Here’s the link to the same video, plus some very heartfelt comments from viewers, at our website, STLtoday.com

“I could feel the cold! So many of these pictures were untold stories, like the beautiful house with the furniture piled at the curb.What’s going on there? Thanks, Erik, for your observant eye’s view of the ordinary.”  – viewer and commenter Judy Stark.

Tire tracks in the snow, north St. Louis County, seen from Metrolink rail.