Finally, eh?

Well it did indeed snow on new years eve, and in such a way that I was unable to get to a party I was invited to and hung out at home playing video games...which I guess isn't so bad. It was only 31 degrees, so the snow was that sort of wet, sticky stuff that's great for snowballs, but makes the roads all greasy. There was only about 2 inches of it in the morning, as much of what fell turned into slush and melted off by then, but it did leave enough of a dusting for me to start gathering references. I'm worried though, because it's been bright and clear every day since then and in the upper 30s, and it's supposed to get even warmer through the end of this week, so there will be significant melt-off.

Nevertheless I was happy to go out back and photograph some stuff with my NEW CAMERA. Which made me joyous, and you might say, gleeful even--it's a Canon Powershot S3 IS, with a 12x telephoto lens and 6.0 megapixels. It is also, might I add, a massive improvement over my 6-year-old dell-cheapy-POS. The camera has the ability to refocus as much as I need, and is really fast--which is important when the stuff I'd like to be shooting would like nothing more than to run the hell away from me. Anyway, the first batch of photos is of me toodling around out back shooting stuff that looks interesting and getting a handle on how to use the camera. I'm thinking that some of the frozen plants I shot would make nice settings for local songbirds, and the best part is that if I choose a particular one of these plants, I can just go out back and cut it down and bring it inside to paint.













I did get out and find a big flock of our local Canada geese. They were sitting out in the soccer field near the community college (which I had to go check out some stuff at anyway) in a group of maybe 200 or so. I thought that they wouldn't be bothered by me since they were in such huge numbers, but as soon as I started walking towards them they spooked and bolted--which, if you've ever been near a couple hundred geese as they take off is both awesome and really surprisingly loud. But that gave me a chance to really test the shutter speed on the camera, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Tomorrow I'm going to go look for more geese, since I know I can get clear shots of them in action, and I also know likely locations for several more mega-flocks. I'm also going to try to find some other red-squirrel and songbird locations (I put out seed two days ago, but I've mostly just seen gray squirrels out there). So hopefully there will be more stuff by Friday. I'm thinking that this weekend or the next (depending on if we get more snow) a friend of the family will take me out through his back-wood trails in the local game preserve, so that should be pretty cool too.













I know the slideshows are annoying, but if you have a photobucket account (which is free, so why not?) you can click the album name up in the left corner and it will take you to a more user-friendly thumbnail listing.