The Great Melt...

The Great Melt..., a photo by Craig Richardson on Flickr.

Well, our lawn resembles a swamp and there's a couple of inches of water flooding my greenhouse, but the snow is finally melting! All it needs now is David Attenborough to pop up and start talking about how the wildlife will return and how the running water heralds the coming of spring! But it did make for a couple of nice ice photos! These two shots are from the remains of the igloo...

The Great Melt..., a photo by Craig Richardson on Flickr 

[About the photos: These are both macro shots with the Sigma 105mm. Handheld because they were really low to the ground, but aperture at f/14 to get enough depth of field on those ice crystals, even though I'd tried to line the key elements up on the same plane of focus. Light wasn't great and a shutter speed of 1/100 meant I needed an ISO of 800...]

Winter weather (part 4...)

Well the weather decided to show that the last bit of snow was just a practice really, and over the weekend we got rather a lot of the stuff.  Thankfully, its yet to turn to ice so the roads aren't too bad, but the pavements aren't much fun!

It did a bit of damage to the garden - I've got another cracked pane of glass in the greenhouse from the weight of snow, the netting protecting my garlic in the raised bed collapsed under the weight, and my strawberry plants are now warming up in the greenhouse!



I also had to dig out the dwarf Narcissi that I planted under the new turf as a spring surprise for the wife, and at one stage I thought we were going to lose some of our solar lights under the snow!  :-)



But from William's perspective, the snow meant we could make something!  He didn't want to build a snowman ("It will melt" was his response to that suggestion - I think he's been traumatised by watching The Snowman and the Snowdog on TV!) but we settled on an igloo, and with the aid of an old washing up bowl to make the bricks, I think we did a pretty good job...



(I will admit though that the roof didn't survive the weight of the new snow overnight!)

Winter weather (part 3...)

Winter weather (part 3...), a photo by Craig Richardson on Flickr.

Well, after rain and snow, wind seems appropriate! Our town is on a bit of a hill, and feels like a bit of a wind trap at times. Challenging from a photography perspective - unless you have a serious tornado you usually can't see the wind, only its effects. So here's William's little ladybird windmill being blown around!

[About the photo: Couldn't face going outside, so its a long lens (300mm) shot from the window. 1/30th second exposure was slow enough to get the motion blur I wanted. Of course, 1/30th at 300mm means a tripod is needed...]

Winter weather (part 2...)

Well after rain, snow should be easy!  :-)

I love taking snow shots.  Snowy days in London always used to see me down in Crystal Palace Park with the camera (thanking heavens that London transport is so pathetic that a snowflake on the railway line effectively meant a day off work as I couldn't get to the office...).  Here's one of my favourite shots from back then. The snow can freak out the camera's metering system (it expects gray, it gets white, so it under exposes to make the white look gray) but that can be dealt with.

But taking a shot of it actually snowing was a bit more fun. Main problem was the shutter speed.  Too fast and the snow is white specs - hard to see unless its snowing really hard (it wasn't). Too slow and you just get too many white trails. In the end I settled on a shutter speed of 1/25th second - about the limit of what I could hand hold with my 24mm lens.

In the end, it didn't snow that long and it didn't stick around, much to the relief of my wife!

A snowy day....

Next challenge? Wind!  :-)

Winter weather (part 1...)

It feels like we've had a pretty awful run of weather lately,have barely been able to get out into the garden, let alone do anything.  So here are a few weather photos until it improves and I can get started properly!

Its always hard trying to effectively show weather in a photo unless its something obvious like snow or fog. I'd been pondering how to show it, but then one of the most annoying things about the new house actually came in handy...

This is our security light.  In theory, a passive infrared turns it on when it detects heat.  In reality, its far too sensitive, and just having the heating on can cause the light to be on all night. And of course, when the previous owners fitted it, did they fit a switch inside to control it?  Of course not. Its wired straight into the lighting ring main.  Even masking off part of the IR sensor with tape has made no difference, I dread to think what its doing to my electricity bill.

So all in all, annoying, but it did enable me to capture a shot of the rain the other night...

 Rain, rain and more rain....