We’ve had enough of this, January!

All right, fine, we’re about 10 hours late on this one. I’m betting not one of you out there exists noticed.

But yes, it’s still the 31^st, so still time for the end-of-month abstract. And this one is timely, at least.

Not that hard to figure out, so I won’t try to maintain the suspense, but this is the elaborate showing for the winter storm that was threatened to begin around midnight. Is this poignancy? I’m taking it to mean that the storm is moving in slower than initially predicted, and we’ll see a lot more later, but right now it’s fine. I have a few more shot this morning that will be along in a little while.

But right at the moment, we’ll examine two others, just for comparison.

Out searching for abstract images, I knew the coral bark Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Sango kaku’) was standing out nicely in these conditions, so I picked an angle to do a few frames. This is with the Canon 18-135 STM lens, but I wanted to see how the Sigma macro would render it, so I went back out so armed.

And now, the Sigma 180mm macro. Both had to be manually focused because the subject was too small/narrow against the background for autofocus to hold it dependably, plus the light was decidedly low out there (and the Sigma does not possess any form of image/optical stabilization.) Not to mention my eyes are particularly stubborn about clearing this morning and my own focus is not dependable. They both could have been a tad sharper, is what I’m saying.

The pale band in the background is ice on the pond with a teeny tiny dusting of snow on it, and it’s interesting to see that the Sigma, with much shorter depth-of-field than the Canon, blurred this out so far that it blended more with the bordering darker areas and became darker itself, though the relative exposure based on the field of view probably had its own input. On topic for this week, however, is the bokeh, specifically on that second branch, which looks a little rougher with the Sigma than the Canon even though the Canon is not as far out of focus. And this does happen, depending on the lens and aperture design, but I honestly would have though the Canon would be worse because of its aspherical elements, which I’ve seen to contribute to some weird effects before.

It has apparently started to sleet as I type this, so we’ll see what transpires a little later on today. You know where to find the evidence…