Certainly and primarily ... hurricanes; those are big news anywhere. But also ... snow. We get a good number of days with cold temperatures (35 degrees or lower) throughout winter, but not much snow.
My first winter here (2017-18), we had two snowfalls of note, and only one of those -- 6 inches -- was of any consequence. And even at 6 inches, it didn't last long; it all had melted within 48 hours. Last winter, I can recall only one or two snowfalls also, and again, both very modest amounts.
The pattern seemed on the verge of being broken this winter, however. There had been no snowfall by New Year's, and made it as far as the middle of February without any still.
But on the night of Feb. 20, the East Coast below Virginia saw its first accumulation. It wasn't a lot, mind you. Maybe 3 inches (which in Indiana, where I moved from, or in Wisconsin, where I grew up, is hardly anything to sneeze at).
But it was enough to keep the newsrooms and meteorologists at local television stations to pre-empt network programming at night to convey developments on the "storm" and report road conditions and any school closings (yes, there were a lot).
It also prompted me to take my iPhone camera outside to get a few quick shots at night about an hour or so into the snowfall. The next morning, I used my Canon 6D and Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 to stroll through the neighborhood a more thorough collection before it all melted away. And it did all melt away by the following morning.
The lead-off photo on this post is a look down my driveway in one of the night shots of Feb. 20, taken with the iPhone 11. Another of the night shots, capturing driveway shadows, appears immediately above. I used the iPhone again for a few shots the next morning, including the first one below, where I'm looking down our driveway at the rising sun. After that, I returned inside, grabbed my Canon 6D and headed back to stroll the neighborhood.
I think I mentioned in a previous post how remarkable I feel the camera function of the 11 is -- and I graduated to it from a 10 (so, I went just one level up). But it is, without a doubt, the most significant and dramatic leap of phone quality I've experienced in all of my iPhone camera graduations through the years.
It seems that as long as there is some form of light on one's subject in any situation of low light -- such as night time -- the camera works hard to deliver you a sharp photo. The trick, though, which I learned after a few experiments early on, is to hold the phone as steady as you can for as long as you can, sometimes as long as 5 seconds. That's what I had to do to get the lead-off photo. As I held the phone, I could witness the camera's mechanisms at work because of things showing up on the display screen. When those mechanisms went away, I knew I had my picture.
The lead-off photo is a "color" photo, too, by the way. It looks predominantly monochrome, with perhaps even a hint of sepia. But that was the true colors of the shot, with the tint no doubt influenced by the two tungsten lights above and behind me situated just above the top of two top corners of the the garage door. Like the 10, the 11 also has an auto fix button in the photo edit area. It works as good as (if not slightly better) than the 10. In my brief experience, it nails light and color correction about 88% of the time.
The collection of photos below ends with a shot of blooms on a Camellia bush in our yard. Camellia bush flowers bloom in late fall and winter, so they're popular in the South with people and landscapers who want to extend the floral displays on their properties. You'll see Camellias bloom anywhere from December through February. We have eight or nine camellias on our grounds, most of which we put in ourselves. Come March, you'll see azalea blooms in the Southern landscapes (I was dazzled by these when I visited Savannah, Ga., for the first time in March 2017. Almost all of Savannah's 20+ square parks in the old downtown area have them). There are some azaleas in our neighborhood, including a couple on our property.
As usual, to view a larger, sharper version of a photo, simply click on it. This is particularly helpful if you access the blog using a mobile device.
Photo geek stuff: As mentioned in the text above, I used the camera in my iPhone 11 for early shots of the snowfall -- at night on Feb. 20 and the first few of Feb. 21. After that, on Feb. 21, I used my Canon 6D and Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens, which was equipped with a B+W polarizing filter. I grabbed three exposures of each composition that I later melded into one using Photomatix software during post-processing.
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