Let it snow, redux

Well, the snow did eventually come, and come, and come. Buckets of it! It just won't stop. As of Wednesday morning, we'd had 62 centimeters (about 2 feet) of accumulated snow since all of this began. And probably about 10-15 cm more has fallen since. Closing in on an all-time record snow fall for Vancouver for the month of December. We did have the record accumulated snow on the ground by Dec 25, so it was the whitest Christmas ever for our fair city. Here are some photos:

A tree in my yard.

Icicles on my house.

The view out my front door.

After I shoveled my walk.

Someone's car. Yes, I think that's a car!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

We were supposed to get a snow storm tonight, but we didn't. So I've put some digital snow in my blog instead. Enjoy!

(Note: You can't see it from a feed reader, you've got to actually go to my blog site. And for the technically inclined, here's where I got the code.)

Weird weather! Snow in April in Vancouver!!!

Usually we don't get snow beyond January. This is a very strange winter indeed. We're expected to get an accumulation of up to 5cm. Lows around freezing through Tuesday. I took this photo earlier tonight:

Meanwhile the cherry blossoms are out and looking spectacular. I took this one five days ago:

I'm going out to play in the snow...you come too!

My dog's footprints on the back steps from one of our recent (and unusually frequent, for Vancouver) winter snowfalls.

Beauty in Decay

This is a photo of the old Farnham Mill in Cheshire, Massachu­setts, built circa 1885. A lot of New England towns were mill towns, and the skeletons of their former industry are sprinkled along rivers and country roads. Some have been refurbished and turned into cute little malls with touristy shops. Others have been left to decay and return to the dust from whence they came. This one belongs to someone who appears to be involved in the arts and non-profit organizations in the Berkshires, so maybe she has some plans for it up her sleeves. (It'a amazing what you can find out with a clever Google search!)

In spite of its poor condition, actually because of it, I find this shell of a building quite photogenic. I'm not the only one who does. I discovered that local Berkshire photographer Thom Smith has photographed it and calls it his favorite mill. I saw his photo of it in an exhibit he had at the Berkshire Medical Center when I was there in December. I credit him with the identification of the name of the mill. It's interesting how different photographers can take such very different photos of the same subject. Thom had the advantage of more saturated colors due to the season of the year, but I had the barren trees to reinforce the theme of deadness and decay. I'll leave you to decide which one you like best.

Panoramania!

Small detour from the New Zealand series, as I just have to share something fun with you today. I recently purchased a really cool program called PanoramaPlus 3. It automatically stitches together a panorama out of multiple photos of a subject, even if they are not perfectly aligned. (It uses software technology called autostitch that was developed at UBC. While PanoramaPlus is a commercial product, Autostich is free, if you want to try out the barebones tool to see if you like it.)

I spent this past weekend at Rivendell retreat center on Bowen Island, which gave me a perfect opportunity to take a bunch of pictures of an expansive view to make into a panorama. This photo is the result of running five photos (taken to roughly cover the whole view, with some overlap) through PanoramaPlus. I then did some touching up of the sky in Photoshop to fix artifacts from the multiple perspectives on the roof-line that were left marring the sky in the stitched-together result. Everything else was perfectly seamless!

Who needs to lug around a view camera when you can do this?

Mystery revealed

The answer to the first mystery photo is snowflakes on my dog's back. Here is the original photo. I cropped it to the out-of-focus section in the upper left, which I thought made an interesting pattern, and was suitably mysterious. Sometimes throwing subjects way out of focus intentionally can be a useful artistic device.

Also, this rather boring original photo shows you that you can often find a hidden gem even in a throw-away shot, so don't throw any of them away until you've given them a closer look. When I first got my digital camera, I used to delete bad shots right on my camera as soon as I took them. But I read somewhere someone's philosophy that the record of digital photos you've taken should be no different than the strips of negatives we used to keep all of, even if only a few of the shots were worth printing. With a 1.5 terabyte hard disk, and cheap optical archival media (double-sided DVDs), I have no need to weed. So now I keep virtually all of my original digital images. I'll only ditch the really bad mistakes (e.g., a lovely picture of the inside of my lens cap) when there's obviously no material for mining of art.

'Tis mystery all...

I like Admonit's idea of posting mystery photos here and leaving you all in suspense for a while. So, without further ado, here's one. Please post your guesses in the comments. Maybe this will lure a few of you lurkers out of hiding. I'll report the answer in a few days and will keep score of who gets it right. Hint: this one was taken on November 25.

To post a comment:
1. Click on the "COMMENTS" link below a post.
2. Type in your comment
3. Choose an identity. If you don't have a Blogger account, you can still leave a comment, either as your name or a pseudonym if you prefer -- preferably one that would let me guess who you are but you'd remain in cognito to the wider Internet world. For either of these options, choose "Other" and fill in your name or pseudonym (you can leave your web page blank if you don't have one). I'd rather you not post under the third option, Anonymous, but there's no way in Blogger to disable that option without also disabling people from posting who do not have Blogger accounts. If you do use Anonymous, you can always still sign your post if you like.
4. In the Word Verification box, type in the funny squiggly letters you see in the picture above it. This is to verify that you are a human being, to prevent automated spam from showing up here.
5. If you want to check out how your comment is going to look (good idea if you use any HTML code in it), click Preview and make sure everything comes out OK. Otherwise skip to step 6.
6. Click "Login and Publish" (or if you did Preview first, you can also click "publish this comment")

Winter Wonderland

The storm from a couple of days ago continued and broke a 50-year-old record for snowfall this early in the season. Here's my street. This photo makes use of the element of line, which is important in composition. Also, the vanishing point is on one of the imaginary vertical lines dividing the photo into thirds. I experimented with flipping the photo to make the diagonal line go from lower left to upper right, generally a stronger composition leading the viewer's eye into the photo (because we Westerners are used to reading from left to right), but (a) it looked awkward to me because it's not how my street looks, and (b) there is some sense in having the diagonal go this way, because it creates tension in a photograph, and that is somewhat consistent with how some people might be feeling about having all that snow on the roads. It is still a peaceful scene (undisturbed snow on trees and cars is inherently peaceful), but I wanted to convey that it's more complex than that. These roads are pretty treacherous. They don't plow or put salt on the minor roads in Vancouver.

First snow of the season

This is more along the lines of the "one photo a day" project I initially thought this blog would be about. I realize I've strayed away from that due to my love of teaching, and my desire to show off my best photos from the past here. A photo a day won't always produce framable wonders. But it is a great form of documentary photography. See my discussion of that on a recent post over at Iambic Admonit, another blog I write for occasionally. Don't worry, I will continue to "stray" into showing off great photos as long as I don't run out of them. But I want to keep doing some new work as well.

I took this photo last night as the first snow of the season was coming down. It was pitch dark out, but I used flash and was thus able to freeze some of the falling snowflakes in mid-air. The black blotches on the ground are a stone pathway in my back yard. Interesting how the stone holds onto its heat from the day long enough to melt the snow falling on it. This looks black & white, but it is a color photo.