Day 11

Old Man Winter ushered in some more snow here last night and today.  So as soon as I got home from work, I grabbed my camera and headed out to my back yard sans gloves (so I could change settings easier).  By the time I was done, not even 10 minutes later, my hands were super frozen.  I had to run them under some warm water to thaw them.  Ah, the price we pay for attempting to get some good photos!  It wasn’t even that cold here, but the wind was quite ferocious and was causing some crazy drifts.  Despite having about 4 inches of snow, there are parts of our yard that are barely snow covered because the wind has blown nearly all the snow away.  And since I had several favorite photos of the day, I thought I’d share them all here.  I’ll be doing that on occasion.  Why share just one photo a day?

This grass bunch near our detached garage is one of my favorite plants in the yard.  Though it looks pretty all year long, I would argue that it’s prettiest in winter with it’s warm tones, especially when juxtaposed next to some white snow.  Our neighbor’s pretty fence added some nice contrasting color in the background.

Editing: slight adjustments in RAW, cropping, pioneer woman boost action
f/2.2
1/125 sec
400 ISO  
50mm

I snapped this photo of our snow-covered log pile.  In hindsight, I probably should have backed off a bit to get more of the sides of the logs rather than just the ends.  I’m not sure if the subject is obvious to viewers.  But, I still like how this shot turned out.

Editing: slight adjustments in RAW, cropping, pioneer woman boost action
f/2.2
1/50 sec
400 ISO  
50mm
 


Our cat Kenai ventured outside today because like us, he’s feeling a little stir-crazy from being inside so much this winter.  Though he loves being outside, he doesn’t love the snow.  I snapped this photo of him standing on the little ledge by our back door hoping to go back inside shortly after we’d let him out.  I’m sure he was thinking something like, “quit taking my picture and let me in the house already!”.  Love that I captured the little snowflakes on his back and one of his paws “buried” in the snow.

Editing: slight adjustments in RAW, cropping, pioneer woman boost action
f/2.2
1/160 sec
400 ISO  
50mm

If you didn’t already notice, my images are now posting in high resolution.  All my prior pictures are lower quality because Blogger compresses them during posting.  It was making me quite peeved.  All the editing I was doing was for naught because much of the edits wouldn’t show up in the compressed image.  After much “googling” (is that a word?), the only solutions I found were some pain-in-the-neck work-arounds.  However,  tonight I actually stumbled on a simple solution…..a Flickr Image Plug-In for Windows Live Writer (my normal posting software).  Now I just upload my high quality images to Flickr and import them directly into my posts via Live Writer.  Ahhhh….it’s the little things that make my heart sing!