Winter Skies

We're in the middle of 3 days of forecast snow flurries and squalls, with the temperature hovering around -15 degrees C,  so there aren't many blue skies at the moment.  But a few days ago we had several beautiful winter days.  And it really is winter here now, with a lot more snow over the past 48 hours!

Not often I'd post a picture of an empty signboard, but this is the soon-to-be brand new trail head for the cross-country ski trails being planned at the Beaver Valley Ski Club.  I walked the trails when they were laying them out about a month ago to help with making a map, and I can't wait to try them.  When that sign gets filled in it'll be an exciting new opportunity very close at hand - I could literally ski to the trail head from here, a two minute drive away!

These were taken a little further down the 7th Line, on a very cold frosty morning a week and a half ago.  This stream is one that drains into the sinkholes that are part of Wodehouse Karst, but it was the cloud pattern in the sky that caught my attention.  This photo looks over a large wetland to the ridge in the distance where the new ski trails will go.

The same sky but a different view, a short distance down the road where the land is a little higher and drier, with a couple of elm trees silhouetted against the sky. 

One of several very frosty fencerows of old maple trees just around the corner.  

This picture was taken in mid-morning two days ago, just down the road to town, a bit west of here.  It's a large cornfield that they finally got harvested just 3 or 4 weeks ago.

And just in case you get the wrong impression and think we always have beautiful sunny blue winter skies, this is essentially the same shot as above, taken 3 or 4 hours later in mid-afternoon.  The days often seem to move from a bit of sun and blue sky in the morning to gray and blowing snow by later in the afternoon.  Roads are bad and some meetings are cancelled around here tonight.

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A Gray Day on the Bay

Georgian Bay is often known as the 6th Great Lake.  Four of the lakes are shared between the U.S. and Canada (Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario), one is in the U.S. (Michigan), and Georgian Bay, really just a huge bay off Lake Huron, is entirely in Ontario.  You can find them all easily on any map of North America.

But Georgian Bay is one of the most beautiful of them all in my opinion, especially for its shoreline further north - rivalled only by Lake Superior.

I was in Meaford today for a meeting and dropped down to the harbour afterwards to take some pictures.  I've posted some brilliant blue summer pictures of the bay before, but this is a much more typical winter view - gray and slightly menacing.

Meaford is a popular sailing harbour, but all the boats are long since out of the water to protect them from the ice, and sitting in wait for next spring.  The winter wind was howling while I was there, and all the cables on these boats were snapping and clanging in the breeze.

It's not entirely a recreational harbour; this looked like an old fishing tug on the left, and the Canadian Coast Guard's 'Westport' was up on the dock also waiting for the next season.  I didn't know there was a Coast Guard station here until I saw EGCameraGirl's post a week ago - though her picture is taken earlier in the season and is of a different boat.

The whole harbour is behind huge stone breakwaters (seen in the background here) to protect the boats from occasional storms rolling in off the bay, .  I liked this composition with the old ship's anchor in the foreground and the small lighthouse in the back.  There's a huge history of shipping on Georgian Bay, like all the Great Lakes, including many shipwrecks over the past century and a half..

The sun peaked out behind the gray clouds for a few moments and the snow gusts abated long enough for me to get this closer picture of the light.  Boaters have to be careful to follow the right channel leaving and entering this harbour.

A final nice view of the light with a patch of blue sky over the bay (which quickly disappeared in favour of high winds and gusty blowing snow for my drive home).

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Lichen

On that warm day we had recently, with our snow almost gone, I was trying some after-dark 'light painting' shots out by the fencerow (that's another post).  In my flashlight the lichens on the apple tree and the rocks stood out dramatically.  So the next day I went out to get some shots before winter returned (which it has).  Here are a few of the results.

My favourite lichen-covered boulder in our fencerow.

And a close-up.

 Another one; they all seem to grow in circles.

And a close-up of the centre of the above shot.

Another one, this one growing on an old wooden beam.

 Two different lichens on a boulder that is strangely bare of the dark weathering on all the others.  I only wish I could learn to identify these.

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Another Beaver Valley Sunrise

We had another colourful valley sunrise on one of those frosty mornings earlier this week, as the sun rose behind the trees remarkably far to the south.  This one turned as red as any I have seen around here - not that I'm up to see many except at this time of year.  Rising below a bank of gray clouds it provided spectacular patterns for a few moments, just getting redder and redder til it suddenly disappeared.

I'm sure those of you living to the south of us occasionally complain about the cold arctic air from Canada!  Well, we had a 24 hour blast of unwelcome warm air from the U.S. yesterday.  It came with a warm front, which generated heavy rains and thunderstorms in December!  Almost all our snow is gone except in patches, though it's well below zero today and expected to stay that way.  Sooner we get some more snow the better for me.

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Playing with Lightroom

I've been using 'Lightroom' as software for photo organizing and editing for a few months now, still very much just scratching the surface of what it can do.  What I really need to work on is organizing my photos so I can find what I want when I want it.  But yesterday I was playing with editing.

         

In each pair of photos here, the first photo is the unedited version as it came out of the camera, shooting in RAW format.  The second is my edited version.

It was a dull gray December afternoon, with snow everywhere, but a dull white under the clouds.  I thought the pictures were basically useless.  But as a learning exercise I decided to see how far I could push Lightroom adjustments, brightening and sometimes cropping these to make useable pictures.  They're still not very good pix, but I was amazed at what you could do.

               

              

Of course this brings me up against wondering what is a 'real' picture and what isn't.  The darker ones are what I really saw, so they're realistic.  But the edited ones are perhaps a better portrayal of the seeds.  Pushing the adjustments any further would have become definitely unrealistic.

 

 

The first three of these are from flowers in the garden; the last is an aster that grew at the edge and never got weeded out.

Hogg's Falls Walk

I've posted pictures of Hogg's Falls before here.  It's a favourite place to go practice waterfall photography, and the starting point for several interesting walks on the Bruce Trail.  This time a friend and I tried out the Lower Side Trail.  It turned out to be an easier walk than I expected.

The trail starts out along the side of the river, providing great looks at the rushing water.  I was on snowshoes which really weren't needed, but did provide better footing because of the metal cleats on the bottom.

Soon you come to the falls itself, the place I first learned how to take pictures that 'slow down' the water as in this picture.  The falls is about 15 feet high and nearly 30 feet wide.

There are two side trails here, as well as the main trail, so blazes and signs are important.  We followed the lower loop, as I tend to find serious hills slow me down a lot.

Blue blazes mark the side trails on the Bruce Trail.  I was partly scouting this trail out as the possible location for a tree ID hike next year, and I did find at least a dozen different tree species, but this part was mainly a sugar maple forest.

Some of the maples had some interesting moss and fungi patterns on their trunk.

A fallen forest giant.  A volunteer chain-saw crew cuts trees that fall across the trail, and standing dead trees too close to the trail, but this one fell on its own.

Before I knew it, we were back to the river, here split into three channels through the flat gravel bars in the valley, through mostly a cedar forest.

Here the river is back into one channel, headed downstream for the falls.  A nice winter outing, followed by coffee and politics in the nearest coffee shop.

Beautiful Frosty Winter Morning

We woke to a beautiful cold but sunny winter morning, again with widespread frost.  It was so nice out I took a short drive to try some pictures.  These are some of the results.

Around the corner.

Same trees; different view.

 Across the field.

 

In the fencerow.

Down by the swamp.

Along the road.

 Along the road #2.

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