Tag Archives: photography

Photo of the Week – February 10, 2012

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This has not been a great winter for snow photography.  Mild temperatures have made it nice for many outdoor activities (excluding ice skating, sledding, skiing, etc.) and for overwintering sandhill cranes, but there hasn’t been any snow on the ground since December.

That finally changed last weekend with about 11 inches of heavy snow and strong winds.  I haven’t had much time to get out and enjoy the snow yet, but I did manage a quick trip to a prairie west of town this week.  It was one of those days on which the sun comes up in a clear sky and there’s about 15 minutes of light between the time the sun pops over the horizon and the time when the sun becomes so bright that the glare makes photos difficult.  Because of that, I didn’t come home with very many photos.

Still, it was nice to be out in the snow.  Hopefully, it’ll stick around for a little while.

Canada milkvetch seed heads stick up above a snow drift. Restored prairie at Deep Well Wildlife Management Area near Phillips, Nebraska.

Snow changes things fairly dramatically for foraging animals.  This mild winter has made it relatively easy for animals to find what seeds and other food items are available.  With nearly a foot of snow on the ground, however, those animals have to either burrow around to find food or rely on food sticking out above the snow (like the seeds in these Canada milkvetch pods.)

The sandhill cranes along the Platte River right are suddenly unable to forage widely for waste corn in the fields, but are much more restricted to those areas where the wind scoured most of the snow off of high points in cropfields.  It appears that we’ll have cold temperatures for a while now, and that will keep the snow around.  It’ll be interesting to see if the cranes decide to tough it out here until warm temperatures return or head south a ways to find easier foraging.

Photo of the Week – February 3, 2012

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I’ve always admired black and white photographers.

(Or at least photographers who take black and white photos…)

The photo below, however, is a color photograph.  It just happened that the scene was black and white.

Ice stalactites on the edge of a hole in a frozen stream. Lancaster County, Nebraska.

This photo was taken along a frozen stream in Lancaster County, Nebraska – just north of Lincoln.  The surface of the stream was frozen solid enough that I was able to walk on it, but there were a few places where the water beneath the ice was flowing strongly enough that it kept small holes in the ice open.  This image shows a portion of the edge of one of those holes.  (The hole was probably 2 or 3 feet in diameter.)

Because the water was flowing fairly fast, it splashed periodically, and those splashes – and subsequent drips – created stalactites of ice from the flat roof of ice over the water.  There were several holes with similar formations, but this was the most dramatic of the stalactites.

It was a bright overcast day with high thin clouds that eliminated shadows but still created a well-lit scene.  Cameras can only handle a certain range of light from bright to dark, so the degree of contrast between the white ice and the darker water below is what results in the black and white look of this image.  I wanted to be sure I captured the details in the bright white ice, but in doing that, the camera  was unable to also capture the full range of colors and tones in the much darker water below.  As a result, the water shows up in the photo as black.  In a delightful bit of serendipity, the glare from the bright sky reflecting on the dark water created some terrific highlights that both break up the dark background behind the ice and show the movement of the water beneath.