Yesterday it started snowing. First a very thin white dusting in the morning, but in the evening it was a lot more, and I took a few pics out of the window in the middle of the night, just for documentation – not a blog post. Also shot a few seconds of video, to see the movement of the flakes. Pausing the video gave a nice effect to that movement, so I took a screenshot of that. And that made me want to post it:

streetlight in snow
or snow in streetlight

Update 14.30hr:

Of course, cropping was essential, here’s what it looked like without the benefit of a zoomlens:

Obviously, the real thing was way better – but maybe it’s good we can’t capture the real thing; we’d stay indoors all day looking at pictures instead of experiencing the fleeting beauty that comes and goes with the seasons.

Misty morning in Holland, as seen from the train to Schiphol

Snowy mountains in the clouds over Italy – I think…

Colourful Venice

Venetian wildlife

Slippers in the sun

Up …

Light

Gondolas

Floor in swimming pool as seen through my sunbed

Looking up from sunbed by the swimming pool…

By the poolside

In July, we had rain.

Rainy Sunday morning

Rainy Sunday afternoon

After the rain there was sun.

It stopped! (the rain)

At home, I left a thin slice of melon skin on top of a near empty wine glass. Eventually it curled up and fell in…

Beautiful decay

When July finally got really sunny and summery, I went to England, where it was … raining.

Well, not the first day, which had quite a few sunny spells, which I enjoyed while in a 5 hour traffic jam.

While it was raining outside, this really nice staircase in the museum of Liverpool was perfectly dry.

We also kept it dry on the ferry across the Mersey, where I took the following photo inside the corridor that leads to the ferry on the south side.

Of course by the time I landed in Amsterdam again, the summery weather had passed already.Typical ;-)

Arrival at Schiphol airport

But … I wonder: what do you see in the third photo? ;-)

Then, I was “tagged” by someone with the challenge to post a ‘before and after’ photo – the original, and the edited version. Given that I prefer to stick to the square format, I resorted to doing two of these in one, so that with two originals and two edited ones, I’d be back in a square.
I have to say that I wasn’t really aware of how much I edited my photos until I put them side by side. Quite a difference I’d say :-)

This week came another challenge, to upload 3 versions of one image: the original, an edited version, and a black and white.

I chose an image I hadn’t used before, quickly edited it in Snapseed, and then wondered what to do with the black and white one. Below are four versions, in this order: original, edited, black and white, and “dramatic black and white”.
Which one do you prefer?