Although it mostly wasn’t super cold while I was in New Mexico, there were still some interesting ice formations to be found in the mountains, particularly around streams. This was partly because it was colder the higher in the mountains you got, but also because the temperature differences between day and night were more extreme there.
Heal-all (also known as prunella vulgaris as well as a bunch of other names) is a common plant, and I frequently walk past it any time I’m out and about. Sometimes it catches my attention and I take pictures.
It’s interesting to see how different plants change throughout the seasons and which ones catch my attention in the winter.
Earlier this winter I spotted some interesting looking structures on an old dried lobelia plant. They were pretty tiny, so, as I frequently do, I brought out my macro lens to photograph them and get a better look.
They turned out to be the skeleton of the part of the plant that holds the seed capsules. I realized this when I managed to find one that was still holding on to a capsule.
In summer, great lobelia has distinctively shaped blueish-purple flowers. In winter it is very much just one more dried plant stem unless you look very closely!
These are some pictures of snowflakes on my glove that I took the other day. They were big wet snowflakes, but there was one I found that was more normal sized.
It has finally started to look like winter around here, giving me a chance to practice my ice and snow photography. Quickly dropping temperatures seem to be necessary for some of the tiny ice crystals I look for and the conditions haven’t been right for seeing them until recently.
For a couple years now, I’ve been taking pictures of the sunlight reflecting off of the snow, but none of them have had the colors I notice in the snow while taking the pictures… after a bit of experimenting I noticed that the colors only show up when the snow is out of focus, so I intentionally blurred a few pictures to test it…
An out of focus picture with specks of color didn’t seem like a particularly good end to that line of experiments, though, so here’s what I came up with:
One morning recently we had a pretty frost over everything. I took the opportunity to get out my macro lens. The dead stalks of last fall’s white asters turned out to give me the best pictures. All the pictures I selected for this post are of the frost on the asters.
We had a couple of freezing rain storms over the past week, which provided me with a rich source of photography opportunities. Here are a few of my favorites.
Freezing drizzle isn’t among many people’s preferred weather, nor is it particularly spectacular looking when glanced at casually. It takes a closer look than most would give it to appreciate its effects.
