| The above will search Ashland Daily Photo. |
This was a lucky shot. Like yesterday’s capture, it’s out my car window on Highway 89 in California between Cayton and McCloud. The clouds were looking good so I took a shot. At 55 MPH you never know what you are going to get in the foreground. I ended up with a nearly perfectly centered tree in the frozen tundra.
View out my car window on Highway 89 in California between Cayton and McCloud…
After spending the night in Susanville, California we headed northwest through the forest. This was our third trip through the Lassen area (twice in winter and once in summer) and the views never cease to amaze me. I’m used to the I-5 view of Mt. Shasta so seeing it from “the back side” is always a thrill.
Once again, the photograph quality isn’t the greatest as it was taken through a dirty window. This time we were probably only going about 55 MPH or so since we were no longer on I-80.
I had a hard time choosing between today’s images. Instead of making a choice I will present both.
When I woke up the day after Christmas the above was the view from my bed. My camera happened to be next to the bed so I just reached down and took this photograph while still lying down. The snow on the bottom of the window frame reminded me of how kids draw snow scenes. This may have been the first time I actually saw snow lining the bottom of a window in real life though.
Not content with just a view while horizontal, I also went up to the window to capture this second, unframed scene. A blue sky always seems a bit bluer when there is snow on the ground (plus the tinted window seemed to give everything on the other side of it a bit of a blueish hue).
This may look like ordinary playground equipment. However, if you are in Lithia Park at just the right moment you will get to see that it is actually a moon launching apparatus. After particularly successful launches a bunch of snow sprays out as a sort of afterbirth. It’s very beautiful to watch. I was about 5 seconds too late with this picture for you to see the actual moment of launching. Sorry.
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.
Now that the leaves are gone from my Japanese Maple the sky must make up the difference in lost color.
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.
Continuing my walk on Ridge Road from an entry 3 or 4 days ago, this is a view across Lithia Park from the east looking west. You can make out pieces of Strawberry Lane (where I took a nasty spill on my bike many years ago before they paved it) and Scenic Drive.
The nice thing about Ridge Road is you can see so many different things from it. Look to the south for nice views of Mt. Ashland and the Siskiyou Mountain Range; to the west you get Lithia Park (if you look down) and this; to the north is downtown, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the Ashland Springs Hotel; and to the east you can see SOU, Grizzly Peak, and much more.
