As part of my New Year resolution I’ve been carrying my camera with me everyday so recently during a lunch time snow squall I was lucky enough to grab some shots of a couple of die hard ice hockey fans who had cleared a patch of ice on the pond and started playing. They couldn’t play for long since the snow covered their rink almost as fast as they cleared it but they had a few minutes of fun and I got the photographs I was hoping for.
This morning I looked out the window and was greeted by one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. A sun pillar. This is a shaft of light extending from the sun usually at sunrise or sunset caused when the light reflects off ice crystals in the clouds. This photo is straight from my DSLR with only noise reduction and sharpening. I tweeted a photo from my cell phone as well but that one didn’t do full justice to the image. I had to wait until tonight to load the camera ones onto my computer.
The first proper snow of the winter fell last night. It’s just the start and if the forecast is correct it’ll probably be gone by the weekend but it was enough to get me out at lunch time to take some photos around work. The snow isn’t deep but it’s cold, -15 wind chill. As the winter goes on the lake will freeze over, last year people played hockey on it. I’m hoping to get some photos if something similar happens this year.
I went up Signal Hill last night to take some sunset photos. It was a lovely evening with just a little bit of wind so it was perfect to try out some long exposures. This is my favourite of the night when it was dark enough to show the city lights but there was still some sunset light in the sky and several cars were coming and going from Signal Hill.
We took a trip to the Brigus Blueberry festival earlier this month. Brigus is a pretty little town and the festival is very popular. Still there were quite little spots to take some photos around the edges of the town as people arrived or left.
One of the local novelty attractions of the year is the frozen waterfall down at Middle Cove beach. I finally got down to it at the weekend to take some shots before it melted. Unfortunately many others had the same idea and there was a constant flow of people taking photos and selfies in front of the falls. Thankfully I had thrown my long exposure filters in the bag before leaving and decided to set up for 2 minute exposures which blurred out most of the people except those who stood in the same spot. That happened in this shot but what was weird was the fact that it appears the person standing in the shot didn’t move a muscle for at least a minute of the two. I don’t remember anyone like that, a couple of other photographers with monopods and the like but none where someone just stood arms at their sides. It’s a bit spooky.
On a side note, I recently had a bit of a problem with my WordPress installs, they got wiped in an upgrade and though my hosting provider manager to restore from their own backups I still took the opportunity to revamp the template for my blog. Then because I am a real glutton for punishment I decided to reformat my laptop so it took me a while to get back up to speed again, especially since I forgot to copy over my Lightroom Presets and Templates, which are not stored with the catalogs, so I had to go hunting through Time Machine backups. Lesson learned.