The grounds near the house are unappealing photographically: there is little/no snow and everything is a brown as one might expect under the circumstances.
This morning, Christine said that she intended to go to Stoney Pond for snowshoeing and I was shocked. While it is a higher elevation, I couldn’t imagine that they had that much more snow than us, and I encouraged her to bring her trail shoes (which she did).
While she did use her trail shoes, she also returned home saying that there were some trails where she was able to use her snowshoes and she showed me some pictures that had been captured by friends with lovely snow covered trees.
With 2 hours of daylight to burn tonight, I decided to drive out and scout out some scenes for tomorrow morning and … I never made it there.
As I was approaching Perryville, it was clear to me that all of the trees in Fenner were covered and white, so I elected to take a detour to the wind-mills/-turbines on the hilltop. Perryville itself looked much like Chittanango, but 200′ higher in elevation revealed a wintery scene that was really fun to see.
Initially, the sun was shining bright, resulting in some contrasty imagery.
One of my favorite views while the sun was shining was from the south, looking north toward the turbines. On one occasion, the trees were glistening in a manner that seemed unreal, as if my eyes were seeing summer trees in infrared.
I considered continuing to Stoney Pond, but the winds were increasing in strength/speed and I suspected that the snow that the snow was being knocked down off the trees, so I elected to just drive around local roads in and around Fenner looking for sights of interest until the sun lowered toward the horizon (I didn’t find any).
As the sun began to set, it became obscured by thin clouds, resulting in a soft light that didn’t help any of my previous compositions, but offered a very nice soft image of one of the turbines. Initially I tried to capture an image that featured the fence posts in the foreground.
And while I don’t hate it, it was difficult to capture the way that I wanted. I needed to have a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the blades of the turbine, but the light was fading, so I needed to use a higher ISO and a wide aperture, so I couldn’t get the depth of field that I needed to keep both the fence posts and the turbine sharp. Thus, I drove a little farther up the road a few minutes later when the light was its most colorful and took a series of images trying to capture the shadow of the turbine on the vertical column/support. It took me 5 shots, but I eventually got the image I was hoping for.
