The Art of Season Cycle | Part 1: Winter

Outside of writing music, I really enjoy photography. I love trying to capture unseen and overlooked details of the world around me. I am always looking for interesting patterns and textures, both man-made (like those found on architecture or machinery) and natural (the tiny veins spreading across a leaf’s surface, for instance). I take a lot of photos, and many of them end up filed away in a folder called “Possible Album Art.” I don’t publish enough music to use them all, so whenever I complete a project, I like to put together a suite of supplemental artwork materials that incorporate some of these images.

For my Season Cycle project, I decided to assign a photo to every track as a means of getting some of these images out into the world, and in this new blog series, I’m going to showcase the art and talk about how I captured the images. Feel free to listen along while you read!

The Cover Art & Winter Solstice

Both of these images were taken on the same day in 2008 (yikes, that was a long time ago!). It was snowing hard outside and the snowflakes were hitting the window, lasting only moments before melting. I positioned the camera right up against the glass and managed to capture a few solid flakes before they melted away.

Northern Lights

Living in Ohio, we’re generally too far south to see the Northern Lights. In October 2024, a strong solar storm allowed the aurora to make a brief appearance in my neighborhood. It wasn’t nearly as vibrant as the undulating green and pink visuals they’re known for, but I managed to see the sky turn a dark pink. This isn’t a great photo in terms of quality, but a special moment for me, so it seemed worthy of inclusion on the EP’s artwork.

Windswept

This was almost the album cover artwork, but I felt that it was too difficult to identify it as snow when seen at smaller resolutions (and face it, most of how we experience album art is on a phone screen). Up close and in detail, though, I really love this photo. It’s the windshield of my car in the early morning after a heavy snow.

Long, Dark Nights

I had to run up to the pharmacy one evening in mid-November and was surprised by a sudden flurry of snow. The way it moved around the lone streetlight in the parking lot was captivating. If the pole wasn’t visible, you might mistake it for a shot of some distant galaxy, glowing brightly in a field of stars or space debris.

Winterlude

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go hiking early in the morning after a fresh snow. I was a little wary at first (mainly due to the road conditions), but I’m glad I made the trek. There was something really magical about hiking through these snow-covered trails under a clear, bright sky. I thought it was fitting for the midpoint of the EP, a track that leads into the cozier, warmer songs.

Silent Snowfall

I really love going outside at night while heavy snow is still falling. The world becomes silent, and everything transforms into unfamiliar landscapes. I took this photo on my street in the middle of a snowstorm. It was taken with my cell phone camera and then heavily cropped, so the details are all smudged and blurred—it’s not an AI generated image, I promise! Something about the way everything looks under this digital compression reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting. Compare to the original, uncropped photo below.

Full Moon’s Light on Fallen Snow

I really do love the way the night becomes so much brighter when the ground is covered with snow. Those cold, clear nights when the moon is full (or near it) can almost feel like daytime! But I am a hack and a fraud—this image was actually taken in the middle of the afternoon, and then I adjusted the color temperature and brightness to make it seem more like a nighttime shot. Bring on the pitchforks!

(Here’s the original, unedited photo)

And that gets us through the final track of Season Cycle: Winter. If you purchase and download a copy of the EP, there is a digital booklet with some additional photography not mentioned here—just in case you like what you see here and want to see more!

Thanks for reading, listening, and supporting my art! Stay tuned for the next blog, where I go through the artwork for Season Cycle: Spring!

• Ed