We have another sporadic throwback today, a peek at what was happening in years past, and this time we have two from the same day, which was 11 years ago. As I suspected, it was a weekend, a Saturday to be precise, and following a snowstorm the previous day or so. I had gone out once the roads were clear to see what might be found that was scenic, but the snowfall wasn’t significant enough to make for nice picchers, so I didn’t get a lot.
But at one point, stopped alongside the road in farm country, I was greeted by a strange procession coming across a field almost right up to me.
Guinea hens aren’t native, but plenty of people have them as livestock so they’re not too surprising to see, even if they come traipsing out of nowhere about 40 meters from the nearest house. While they appear none too enamored of the winter here, like old Russian women trying to make it to the village, guinea hens always walk like this and were not in the slightest fazed by all the white stuff. They ambled purposefully past me, gossiping quietly to themselves, most likely about my taste in footwear.
Later that evening, I used the conditions to advantage again and took one of my favorite fartsy compositions, while demonstrating that I’m not exactly speedy about taking down decorations.
In my defense, I was waiting for exactly conditions like these to use the snow, and it paid off. This also took a specific time of day, allowing enough light for the snow to be dimly illuminated while still making the holiday lights bright enough, and of course a wide-open aperture to render the unfocused lights as circles and not hexagons or pentagons or however many aperture blades you might have in that lens. And while this wasn’t planned at all, the bracketing layout of the other lights works quite well to me. We did not get enough snow to cover the lights entirely, whereupon I could switch them on at night and get the colorful glow coming through the smooth snow; that came on another date (another year, I believe.) But this worked well enough.