Winter wonderland
aka an excuse to run around with the camera for a while

15-Jan-2008

Small pix are all links to larger 1024x768 versions.


I got up yesterday, saw this out the kitchen window and realized that it was snowing and very grey outside. Shot through a plastic layer, which makes the funny distortions here and there. Know thy autofocus.

A little later I set aside working on Arisia stuff and went outside. The temp was just around freezing and apparently the snow was being very clingy as a result, piling up on everything with no wind to knock it off.

As a result, it was putting a lot of extra weight on tree branches.

I still needed to run some errands, so I put the car on preheat while I shoveled things out.

Poking the drooping pine branches overhead with the end of the shovel was fun, causing little mini-blizzards to rain down on me.


So I ran around doing said errands. This was one of the more amusing little vignettes around the neighborhood. Nice work, guys.

Actually I shouldn't really disparage the plow fellas; they were out there working hard all morning and this fairly sticky snow was probably quite unpredictable as far as how hard it needed to be pushed.


The next morning dawned partly cloudy, and the snow was still quite amazingly stuck to everything. With the sun coming up, I realized as the coffee was brewing that I had a very short window of opportunity to catch more of this rather pretty scene before it started to melt and fall off.

As the early sun crept over the pond and peeked in and out of some cloud layers, it made for some interesting light and shadow play. And lots of fun little sparklies off the snow.


The sheer *density* of the heavily covered foliage was what prompted me to venture out and make efforts to be artistic...

Here we can see how the snow not only stuck to every tiny twig, it didn't just pile up vertically but actually *expanded* as it built up.

Tangled trees in the nearby swamps

This didn't really capture the backlit sparkling effect that I could *see*. Too much dynamic range for the CCD, probably...

...

Nearby road

These folks didn't bother shoveling their driveway, preferring to just blast through it with their SUV. Once this gets rained on and refreezes, they'll probably regret not doing the work.

_H* 080115