Fun in the snow

My nieces are fun loving little monsters, driven by a high intake of sugar. There is only so much of that energy that can be absorbed by iPads, but luckily there was plenty of snow outside. Yesterday we went out to the stable where Sandra’s horse Trula is housed and the girls got a chance to ride her. I have also thrown in a couple of photos from earlier today, showing us riding down a snow covered slope propelled by gravity.

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Trula and two other horses share the same pasture. Here the girls are saying hello and handing out some treats. I like how the horses frame the girls. I tried the photo in black and white, but the pink help the composition.
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Sandra was first up on Trula, and we spent about 15-20 minutes getting a good photo of her riding around. I made funny sounds to get Trula to perk her ears forward. I have grown soft in the warm English climate, and my hands and feet were freezing. I need to invest in proper winter clothes again. There is a Swedish saying, “Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder.” There is no bad weather only bad clothes.
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Fun in the snow. We had a bit of bad luck with the sun, it disappeared just as we started photographing, and did not reappear until we were back in the car when the golden rays showed themselves through the cloud cover again. Here we worked on capturing a bit of action with sprays of snow. I was looking for breaks in the tree line, since Sandra was clad in black she would almost disappear against the dark trees.
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A photo of my niece walking their dog. I had a few similar ones to choose from, but picked this one as I liked that she was walking away from me – towards adventure.

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The middle one had some serious horseman skills. I like how this photo captures her in action steering Trula.
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The look of wonder and curiosity on my niece’s face made me crop this photo to put the focus on her instead of the rider.

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Here I am experimenting with lines in the composition, cropping it in a bit closer.
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This is a close crop from one of the horse photos. I am still amazed at the resolution of the camera. Even at that distance there are enough pixels to see myself reflected in the horse’s eye.

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A bit of play time before heading back.
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This photo of my brother Jonathan and their dog Olav, and the next photo of me, are from today.
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This photo was taken by Sandra. The girl at the top was standing a little bit too far to the left in the picture, so I tried the content-aware move function in Photoshop for the first time. You make a selection then just drag the area to where you want it, and the old space is filled with content-aware fill automatically. Magic!
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I am ending with a photo from the horse riding day. I saw Olav sitting in the car, and my brother approaching… So I could not resist to do a reflection photo.

Another fun thing we did was to play table tennis, which I used to do a lot in Amsterdam, but have barely had a chance to do since I moved to Cambridge. There are some adorable photos from that, which I might share later. As always it is really fun to be in Småland with my brother and his family.

– Johannes

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2 Comments

  1. December 29, 2014
    Reply

    Love them ..such happy faces 🙂 and the close up of the horse’s eye is great!

  2. Cilla Wichmann
    January 4, 2015
    Reply

    Awesome! Fun to see some pictures of Sandra and Jonathan! Never met the kids (yet)

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