F always likes to be up to date with the weather forecast. I don’t know why. I hardly ever look at it; it seems to me that the actual deviation of the weather from “cloudy and cool with a chance of showers” is rarely bigger than the error bars on the forecast for any time more than 12 hours into the future. By the time you get that close, you may as well just look out the window.
Last night I happened to glance at the forecast, which F had left up in a Firefox tab. It said that it should be snowing. “Supposedly, it’s snowing right now, according to the forecast,” I remarked to him, possibly a little bit mockingly. But I was unsure enough to go look out the window.
I was so excited about it snowing (again!) that I had to do something with it. I grabbed my tripod, my camera, the newly-refound IR remote, and G’s new flashlight, and went outside to capture the magic. I started by trying some light-writing.
Of course, with a long exposure like this, you cannot actually tell that it was snowing, so that dampens the magic a little. Also F thought that I’d written the word “snow” with the computer. On top of some sort of Hallowe’en-themed photo.
The above was something like my fourth attempt. I was getting the hang of hiding the flashlight between letters, although you can see by the blue glowing snow that I pointed it downward some of the time.
My second attempt looked like this:
This one has a livelier energy, it seems to me. As though I had just barely been able to keep that exuberant flashlight under control, or as though I’d had too much coffee. I gave myself 25 seconds to write and then didn’t need it all, so I hung around for a while at the end, as you can see. I’m not sure why I don’t seem to have a head. I don’t remember waving my head around a lot.
Once I figured I’d written “snow” satisfactorily, I took some photos of things covered in snow.
Here’s a solar flare. Or an explosion. Or actually, a tree covered in snow, lit by an orange streetlamp.
What I believe is a crabapple tree, complete with shrivelled crabapples. This was a 5s exposure and it came out much brighter than the scene was, but I really like the colours.
This morning, G woke up to a winter wonderland. She threw snow and made good use of the remains of last week’s snowman, and I got to make my camera go “ca-chik-ca-chik-ca-chik,” usually just before or after G did something I wanted to take a picture of her doing.
Next week it’s supposed to warm up a bit, but right now it’s -8C outside.
