First Frost
Hello and welcome back!
This has been the longest autumn in my memory. Winter hints at arrival, with a frosty nose nip here and there, but has not quite followed through. Luckily, during the first real frost I was not only free, but had the fortitude to get up early enough to enjoy it. The first opportunity to greet me was this buck, standing proud:
Thankfully he was stock still, so even 1/40th of a second was enough. I had to crank the ISO to 3200 to get that shutter speed, but the noise reduction software works really well these days, so it turned out alright.
With this setting a happy tone, everything else fell into place as the sun slowly rose and painted the landscape:
I seem to be a fan of harsh light etching textures into the grasses, so I have a particular fondness for the black and white treatment of the last shot above:
Once the sun was fully up, the frost quickly dissipated, but in the shade, exposed hardware still retained some crystals:
Meanwhile, autumn continued to trundle along, colours fading but still refusing to drop entirely. This had the interesting effect of clearing up some of the undergrowth in the forests, making the fewer points of colour more prominent, like a living Monet. Hopefully I caught the essence of it:
(Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a humorous vibe to the last shot, with the surrounding poplars trying to hold up their friend who’s gone all “drama queen”…)
This kind of scene is rare for us: usually a hard frost will crisp everything up, it all turns brown and we’re done. But we’re not quite finished this year: I went on a rainy walk around Assiniboine Park. Even though the majority of the trees had lost their leaves, there was still a lot of colour, though I couldn’t say no to a couple black and whites:
Finally, on a couple of recent hikes in Birds Hill park, the harsh light of midday seemed to work to my advantage. There’s very little left to “fall”, but that just makes the textures and few pockets of colour more poignant, or at least that’s my hope:
I’ll end this entry with a macro shot, as the milkweed seeds pods have started to crack open, and let loose their star clusters:
As always, thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed.
Cheers!