About to start this post, I checked to see if I’d used the title “Pathetic” before, and I had, to describe my efforts in recognizing a particular holiday. What I’m referring to now, though, is the overnight “snow'” that we had Monday night/Tuesday morning; I don’t care what part of the world you might live in, I doubt you could consider this evidence of a snowstorm:
The vapor looked nice, seeming to indicate that I’d forgotten to turn the burners off on the grill the last time we’d used it, but it’s just from the morning sun. Capturing that against the darker background made the snow bleach out into gross overexposure, so maybe we are talking about my efforts again. I attempted to adjust the exposure to account for this, and the wind shifted or the light angle progressed too far, because the vapor stopped being visible, and I moved on to other subjects.
I feel obligated to point out the single raindrop on this camellia (Theaceae) blossom since it’s easy to miss; the conditions had been light rain for several hours before it turned to snow, so most things were still too warm to allow the snow to stick. I had even been out in it during the peak of the overnight ‘storm,’ attempting to shoot a little night video that might appear here later on if I get some additional clips – trust me, it wasn’t even risking the uncovered camera.
Out of the sunlight, however, a few things showed that the temperature had dropped below 0°c.
That’s the surface of the watering cans outside of the greenhouse, though the ice was probably no more than 2mm thick. The light angle was right to bring them out, though.
And if it hadn’t been for the bubble trails left in this raindrop as it froze, you’d never know it was frozen at all. Other than the grill cover and the table on the deck, I pretty much had to look carefully for signs that it had even reached freezing, though the crunch of the grass was an audible clue. So we return to the grill cover to get a little fartsy – or fartsier, perhaps.
Sigma 180mm macro lens at f6.3, producing a relatively short depth-of-field. This meant some of the sparkles from the snowflakes produced nice visible ‘circles of confusion,’ otherwise often known as ‘bokeh.’ I boosted contrast and saturation slightly to make them stand out better. Then, I did it again with another frame…
… only this time, instead of boosting Saturation by 20%, I made it 100%. Not a huge difference, indicating how little color there was in the first place, but it made the bokeh stand out nicely.
That was it, though – that exhausted the myriad photographic possibilities exhibited by the snow. Ready for spring now.