Loose Strife

At last, I’ve posted some photos from December. We missed a lot of events — holiday parties, bonfire, and so on. Sometimes I just fall out of the habit. We did resurrect the video camera after months collecting dust, but transferring, editing, and posting video just takes too much time. Some day!
My favorite photos last month were taken on Christmas Eve. I was up very late as usual. Maybe waiting to hear some cloven hooves on the roof. I noticed that Santa wouldn’t be needing Rudolph because the moon was so bright that I could see everything as though it were daytime. I set up my tripod in front of the windows and after a lot of trial and error ended up with the following two photos that I really like.
The first is a familiar vantage to those of you who have looked at our other photos. It’s the view from our dining room and you can see the glow of the Connecticut River valley 20 miles away (not the sun rising). I usually don’t like the light pollution, but at 3am on a night like that I thought it was pretty cool. It’s not really as bright as you see here, but the high exposure brings out the light and colors. On the table is a pumpkin that I stubbornly didn’t throw away after Halloween and it is still today in the same spot, slowly rotting away on display. The orange from the pumpkin, almost the only color in the photo except for the orange in the sky, makes for a nice composition.
But I’m really pleased with the second. It’s looking up from the house to a line of trees. The moon shadows show in the snow, the branches look crisp in the cold, and the clouds blur across the sky due to the long exposure. The winds were whipping up clouds from over the ridge that would immediately dissipate as they drifted over the house.
There’s lots of optical noise in both photos, but I think it just adds to the character of the shots. These shots could have been so much better if I had known what I was doing, but I think they work just the same because when I look at them they evoke the sense of magic I felt staring out into the moonlight. You can see very large, full size versions by clicking on either photo.