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Ashland Daily Photo - A picture a day from beautiful Ashland, Southern Oregon USA in the Rogue Valley
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pre-sunrise
This is a sight that is very, very rare in Ashland. We get snow a few times a year, but when it snows there are clouds. By the time we get clear skies the snow has disappeared or will melt very rapidly. The night prior to the taking of this picture we got snow and then the clouds moved on. The temperature went below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (about -20 Celsius) so the snow wasn’t going anywhere.
While this may look like a sunrise picture I actually took it well before sunrise. I left the shutter open for 15 seconds. If you click on the photo for a bigger view you can even see some stars. The part of town you can see the lights coming from is near I-5, Exit 14 (14 miles north of the California border).
Wave-Particle Duality
After dark I decided to try my first ever night photography in the snow. The snow was just barely coming down. I was trying to set my camera to take multiple shots with different exposure lengths. The above and bottom photos are the results of one of those attempts–two identical photos taken in immediate succession. My settings were incorrect so both actually fired with the shutter open for 15 seconds each (I think, the bottom photo looks like it got a couple extra seconds but I’m not sure if that is really the case).
What happened in the above photo to render the wavy line of light that didn’t show up on the photograph below? I don’t know for sure.
My guess is that a snowflake wandered through the viewing area in the top photograph. That doesn’t explain why it begins at the light source though. Perhaps the wandering flake just happened to be in that position when the shutter initially opened. Or maybe the snowflake came off the tree and not the light. I don’t know. The light doesn’t really look like what I’d expect a snowflake to look like should one have stopped by to have its picture taken. Let me know if you have any theories.
View from my computer chair
Now that the leaves are gone from my Japanese Maple the sky must make up the difference in lost color.
Weather Forecast
I was thinking I may wake up to the above scene this morning. Instead we only got a trace of snow although I’m sure the mountains are well covered by now. I can’t see them through the clouds.
So I dipped into last winter to pluck out the above picture. It is the same view as a prior entry, out my dining room window so that I could take the photograph without getting cold. 😉
The forecast is for more snow today and tomorrow so maybe we will look like today’s photo later today or tomorrow.
Mt. Ashland
I went for a walk yesterday on Ridge Road and took a number of photos from there which I will share with you in the coming weeks. This one is of Mt. Ashland before its first real snow of the season. Now that I think of it, this may be the first picture of Mt. Ashland I’ve posted here. I’ll have to get on the ball and make up for lost time.
Autumn leaves, fog, and mountains
The leaves have all fallen during the past few days, but a couple weeks ago you could still see the mountains and fog through a rich display of color courtesy of our Japanese Maple.
Redwoods
When we stayed at the Alfred A. Loeb State Park a little over a month ago there was a trail from our cabin called the Riverview Trail which follows the Chetco River. It was very nice, and I highly recommend it if you are in the Brookings area. However, when the trail ends you do not want to turn around and head back. Instead, cross the street and take another trail. This one is called the Redwood Nature Trail.
While not as spectacular as Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, this trail is still pretty darn special. Stout Grove in Jed Smith can get a bit crowded (relatively speaking for this neck of the deserted woods anyway), but you won’t likely see another soul on the Redwood Nature Trail. The trees can get hundreds of feet high and some are hundreds of years old. Lots of moss and ferns cover the ground; natural creeks with mini-waterfalls abound as well.
On the edge of the fog
As I was eating breakfast I watched the fog creep up from the valley, expanding ever higher until it had engulfed our neighbor just below us. I knew we were next so I grabbed my camera and shot the above through the dining room window.
This is what it looks like to be on the upper edge of ground fog. It grabs you from beneath, but the sun still tries to fight its losing battle from above. The winter sun was no match and we were entombed in the stuff moments later.
Another foggy morning
We’ve had lots of foggy mornings lately. I grabbed my camera to take the above picture not so much for the fog as to get the bright oranges and reds on the Japanese Maple tree in the bottom of the picture. Unfortunately, if I focused on the leaves and had them show up in true color in the picture the sky (and everything else) would turn white and you couldn’t see the fog or mountain tops. It was either colorful leaves or sky/mountains/fog. I couldn’t get both in a single picture even though that is what my natural eyes were seeing. Oh well, it’s still a decent photograph anyway.