![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The first photos of 2006
It's been hovering around zero for weeks now, and there is an amazing coating of frost on *everything*. It looks really cool ... I went and took some pictures today.
Pink sunshine on the hill across the valley. Notice the clear line where the frost-covered trees turn into normal, not-frost-covered trees. We guess that this is caused by the air being warmer on top of the hill ... it melts the frost. (In the severe cold of Interior Alaska, cold air tends to pool in the valleys, and the hills tend to be 20-30 degrees warmer.)
This is also as close as the sunlight is getting to our house at this time of year. Sigh ... I miss the sun. Only another month or so until we'll get it back again ...
More pink sunshine, different foreground trees.
I climbed up to see how the mysterious smoking rocks are doing these days. It's not cold enough to get the plumes of steam, but you can tell they're still doing their thing, because it's melted down to the bare ground in a couple of places, and there are some really amazing, delicate structures of frost feathers on top of the "vents".
Hey, maybe we have a volcano in our backyard!
Frost feathers surrounding a hole in the snow.
My hand for scale.
Adding credence to the "geothermal" theory is a nearby creek that hasn't frozen all winter. It's a very small swamp creek, and since our much bigger creek has been frozen for weeks, you'd think that this one would have done likewise. But it hasn't.
The frost is all over everything, as mentioned, but it's inches thick on the shrubs and dead grasses overhanging the creek ... due to the increased humidity in the vicinity of the water.
And for something a little different, I've been experimenting with night photography lately, with my old-style manual film camera. (The dratted digital camera doesn't have a long exposure setting.) I'm still working on getting my exposure times right, but here are a few of the experiments.
The view from the front yard ... that pink hill that you see so often in my daytime shots. The red dot at the top is the light on a transmitter tower of some sort.
I like this one ... a long exposure looking in the general direction of the moon.
Fiddling with different settings on the camera. Sort of a creepy effect.
This exposure wasn't quite long enough, but it looks kind of cool.
Pink sunshine on the hill across the valley. Notice the clear line where the frost-covered trees turn into normal, not-frost-covered trees. We guess that this is caused by the air being warmer on top of the hill ... it melts the frost. (In the severe cold of Interior Alaska, cold air tends to pool in the valleys, and the hills tend to be 20-30 degrees warmer.)
This is also as close as the sunlight is getting to our house at this time of year. Sigh ... I miss the sun. Only another month or so until we'll get it back again ...
More pink sunshine, different foreground trees.
I climbed up to see how the mysterious smoking rocks are doing these days. It's not cold enough to get the plumes of steam, but you can tell they're still doing their thing, because it's melted down to the bare ground in a couple of places, and there are some really amazing, delicate structures of frost feathers on top of the "vents".
Hey, maybe we have a volcano in our backyard!
Frost feathers surrounding a hole in the snow.
My hand for scale.
Adding credence to the "geothermal" theory is a nearby creek that hasn't frozen all winter. It's a very small swamp creek, and since our much bigger creek has been frozen for weeks, you'd think that this one would have done likewise. But it hasn't.
The frost is all over everything, as mentioned, but it's inches thick on the shrubs and dead grasses overhanging the creek ... due to the increased humidity in the vicinity of the water.
And for something a little different, I've been experimenting with night photography lately, with my old-style manual film camera. (The dratted digital camera doesn't have a long exposure setting.) I'm still working on getting my exposure times right, but here are a few of the experiments.
The view from the front yard ... that pink hill that you see so often in my daytime shots. The red dot at the top is the light on a transmitter tower of some sort.
I like this one ... a long exposure looking in the general direction of the moon.
Fiddling with different settings on the camera. Sort of a creepy effect.
This exposure wasn't quite long enough, but it looks kind of cool.