![[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.
GORGEOUS!
Those snow-feathers are absolutely astonishing.
no subject
Where do you get your film developed?
no subject
no subject
And...You certainly have some geothermal stuff going on there- or the decaying nuclear reactor of some ancient ufo...
Re: GORGEOUS!
no subject
Heh ... I do it at Sam's Club. I am both cheap and lazy.
A trick to commercial film processing that I didn't figure out until *very* recently is that their photo CDs usually look better than their prints, because they're scanned directly from the negatives, so small details show up better, not to mention that with the prints, all the little vagaries of the print-processing machine (or rather, the skill of the person running the machine) like exposure time and whatnot can really ruin your prints. I've gotten some truly awful prints back from Sam's, but the CDs look great.
Most of the pictures that I post on this site are taken with my digital camera, however.
Usually I bring out the manual camera when I feel like getting "serious" and having more control. The digital camera does a lot of automatic "correcting" when you take a picture and this often results in skies being washed out or the shutter speed set too slow for moving objects. I took a whole roll of falling snow pictures with the manual camera the last time it snowed (a couple of weeks ago) but haven't got them developed yet.
no subject
My couch is always available for crashing upon, should you ever come by this way ...
no subject
You'll need a tripod for taking night pictures, and a remote shutter release button helps too, to cut down on accidental camera-shake when the button is pressed. The only tripod I could find for these pictures was a teeny one, the size of my hand. (I know we have a big one somewhere around the house, but I couldn't find it.) I ended up setting the little tripod on top of objects (the hood of the Suburban, a block of wood in the yard) in order to get pictures of anything other than snow.
no subject
My spouse is now sitting by me, wistfully murmuring, "I love frost feathers!"
And, wow, shooting with the film camera after a few years of just shooting the digital -- i forgot what control was like!
no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-01-06 06:02 pm (UTC)(link)-SarahD in CA
no subject
That was basically my reaction too. I was semi-serious about the photography hobby as a teenager, and I used to be pretty good at taking pictures -- calculating aperture and shutter speed, composing pictures ... all of that has pretty much gone out the window with my digital camera, where pictures are free and you can just point it in a given direction, take 30 shots and pick whichever one looks best. I had forgotten how much fun it is to spend 10 minutes setting up a shot, figuring lighting and angles and tinkering with all the little buttons on the camera. Gonna have to do more of that...
no subject
I've really been enjoying the sparkling of the frost crystals in sunlight or car headlights lately.