Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Not Comics: Snow and Frost

As long as Mike's posting holiday snapshots, I thought I'd put a couple of Vermont images up on the ol' blog. Who knows—maybe a cartoonist will find these useful for reference or something.

This is my first winter in Vermont, and I've really been aware of how much different snow, ice, and frost are up here, even compared to New Haven, just a few hours away. When it snows in single-digit (Fahrenheit) cold, you get a really different sort of effect than when it snows in thirty-degree mush. The flakes come down as flakes, like the ones you cut out from folded paper when you're a kid (but with proper sixty-degree symmetry, instead of ninety-degree symmetry). Sometimes they're spiky and blow around like little bits of down; sometimes they're plate-like and sparkle like glitter.

I've been trying to catch some of these pretty patterns with a camera, but it's not easy.



I increased the contrast on that image in photoshop, but I think that's fair. You can click these pictures to enlarge them a bit, as usual.

Here's some frost on my windshield a couple of days ago.



It's really wonderful to live in a place where I wake up to that sort of beauty on a regular basis.

I haven't made any postcards of these images yet, but I get the feeling I probably will.

2 comments:

Damien Jay said...

Wow I really like the top one especially. Is it falling snow, or what is it exactly? They really are text-book snowflakes. Funny.

Isaac said...

They look like they're falling, but actually that's just a shot of a level surface covered with a couple of inches of snow. It's a very close-up image, obviously: those snowflakes are only a little bigger than an aspirin.