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Frosty

Posted on by Patrick
Frosty branches

It was a misty Man­i­to­ba morn­ing¹, but then the clouds cleared about 11 AM and the sun came out. I grabbed my cam­era and head­ed out at noon to see what I could see.

  • Frosty branches
    Tak­en out my upstairs window
  • Frosty branches
    Tak­en out my upstairs window
  • Frosty Tree
    On the side of 50th Street
  • Frosty branches (macro)
    I do like that sky
  • Frosty branches

Which of these three do you pre­fer? I can’t choose.

  • Frosty landscape
    Focus on the fencepost
  • Frosty landscape
    Focus on the trees
  • Frosty landscape
    Focus on the fore­ground grasses
I can’t decide which of these three I like best. Same com­po­si­tions, dif­fer­ent item in focus.

¹ I hon­est­ly thought that was the name of the song, but I was wrong.

Memories of JJ, 9: The Beard

Posted on by Patrick
My dad with a beard

Hav­ing noticed the aus­pi­cious anniver­sary, I was think­ing a bit about Dad. I thought I’d told this sto­ry already, but I could­n’t find it in a search of my site. Maybe it was just in my eulogy.

For most of my life, Dad had a beard. If you dig out the real­ly old SRCI year­books, you can find pho­tos of him clean-shaven. I think he grew the beard in about 1980 or so, and he must have liked the way it looked because he kept it for a long, long time.

He told me once that his plan was to win the lot­tery, do all the nec­es­sary pub­lic­i­ty, cash the cheque, then shave his beard off and become invis­i­bly rich.

It was a sol­id plan, too. If you saw a pho­to of him pre-beard next to one of him with the beard, you might be hard-pressed to say the two pho­tos were the same per­son. JJ : Beard :: Super­man : glasses.

Then one year, when he was work­ing up in Lac Bro­chet, he and Mom came out of the north for the sum­mer and… he was clean-shaven.

The first thing I asked him, when I saw him, was, “Is there some­thing I should know?”

Posted in JJ.

The Great Conjunction

Posted on by Patrick
Jupiter and Saturn at conjunction

Sat­urn met up with Jupiter tonight, in case you had­n’t heard about it on the news.

It was cloudy here, but only part­ly cloudy, so I decid­ed I’d take a quick run out of town with my cam­era equip­ment, to see if I could get any photos.

I stepped out­side and dis­cov­ered I did­n’t need to go anywhere—it was vis­i­ble from my dri­ve­way. So I set up there, and snapped some pho­tos of Jupiter + Sat­urn in between the clouds.

  • Jupiter and Saturn at conjunction
    Jupiter and Sat­urn at conjunction
  • Jupiter and Sat­urn at con­junc­tion (unprocessed)
Jupiter and Saturn at conjunction
Jupiter and Sat­urn at conjunction

In the box­es, top-left to bot­tom-right, are Cal­lis­to, Io, and Europa. Ganymede is too close to Jupiter for my lens to sep­a­rate it.

The half-moon looked love­ly, too, so I got some of the sun­shine reflect­ed off it, too.

  • The Moon
    The Moon, with Earth­shine visible
  • The Moon
    The Moon
The half-moon, with and with­out Earth­shine visible

All the pho­tos were tak­en with my 55–250mm lens, at 250mm, f/5.6, vary­ing times and ISOs.