Jack Frost Strikes Again

This time it was the beautiful fern like patterns of frost on the greenhouse glass which caught my attention. These were taken with the Nikon S9050, processed in Photomatrix Pro and then in Irfanview as the originals have very little contrast:









Each window had a different pattern. I was lucky as they had all melted within 15 minutes of these photographs being taken.

Camera Selfie

Remember this photo of frozen water droplets on a spider's web from the last blog entry? This version has been re-processed a bit as the first attempt didn't upload properly. I just darkened the background. It was very noisy as I had set the camera to ISO 3200 in the hope of getting a reasonable shutter speed while it was hand held:



Last night I looked closer to see what the pattern was in some of the small drops:



Once large enough I could see each drop showed a reflection of the front mounted macro lens and ring flash. Dotted round the edge of each drop are the LEDs in the ring flash. Amazing!

Jewels on the Web

Another cold start to the day. Once again the temperature first thing this morning was -3C but this time with foggy conditions. Most things were covered in frost:

 

While we were out walk-about I noticed how well some spiders' webs were showing as the dew drops on them had frozen:

 

 


A couple of attempts at taking macro shots, hand held so not the clearest of photos:





The light refracting through the frozen water drops made them look as though each spider had scattered jewels along the strands of its web.

Hoar Frost

Another morning where we woke up to freezing conditions. About -3C and much outside covered in hoar frost.

A couple of my attempts to take some macro shots of the frost on the Summerhouse roof:





Otherwise there has been little of interest to photograph recently.

A Splash of Winter Colour

Walking through the churchyard a couple of days ago I spotted that the Winter Aconite are just beginning to flower:

All Clear

Madam relaxing with her Christmas penguin after our visit to the vet where one of the nurses checked that she was progressing well after her tooth job last week:



She was given the all clear so it was £160 well spent! Unlike Bobby, Penny hasn't been put off visiting the vet even after two sets of extractions in eleven months. She goes bonkers if there is a car trip and a possibility of meeting people in the offing.

Looking Up

Just after Sunset yesterday I could see there was a fairly clear view of the Moon so I lugged the 70D with 100-400mm lens plus tripod outside for a few shots:



Then I happened to spot what, at first, I thought was a bright star. There was too much light in the garden to see much else so I had a go at photographing it to see how it would turn out. Every time I took a shot I could see what looked like reflections or refractions on the photo which I couldn't see in the sky:



I tried different positions and extra shade in front of the lens until the penny finally dropped. That was no star. It was Jupiter and with the camera taking about a 1/3 second exposure it was also picking up four of Jupiter's moons which I couldn't see with the naked eye. Probably Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. The above is quite a small crop from the full photo. Definitely an improvement on my last attempt in November 2010 when I failed completely to get any recognisable still shots of Jupiter.