A sunrise to toast first NC snowfall photos

One of the reasons I moved to North Carolina last summer was the allure of a slightly warmer climate than what I had experienced for almost 40 years in Indianapolis.

In Indiana, winters were not nearly as long as and/or brutal as those I remember when living in Wisconsin and, briefly, Iowa. There were about a half-dozen winters in Indy when snowfall for the season was what I would term "negligible," although Indy always got its fair share of cold temperatures. I think there was only one winter in all my years there when the lowest temperature failed to hit single digits.

Lee Ann and I both knew North Carolina and parts south of us weren't impervious to all winter weather; in fact, I'd already told myself I'd have no problem being reminded of the change of seasons from time to time. We just were counting on seeing a lot less of it ... and certainly not so soon after moving here.

So you can imagine my dismay when, in the very first winter in North Carolina, have we not only experienced low temperatures in the teens on several occasions (tonight it's possible the thermometer could even dip below 10 degrees), but the other day, we also experienced our first snowfall. Fortunately, it was nothing to lose any sleep over.

You may have heard or read about the so-called weather "bomb cyclone" that crushed the East Coast yesterday, particularly those people living on the northern end of it. The system hit North Carolina on its way north, and we were on the far western fringe of it. We received only an inch and half of snow, and it all came after dark Wednesday evening. I made a point to grab my iPhone before walking out to retrieve my newspaper Thursday morning so I could record anything picturesque.

It was picturesque, indeed ... and cold. I wasn't dressed with many layers to deliberate much with my compositions, so I snapped as many shots as I could as quickly as I could while circling the house to record our first-ever snowfall in North Carolina.

Just after I started, I was treated to the orange and yellow burst of rays from the rising sun slipping through trees in the yards of neighbors across the street, so I worked to integrate the sun into my compositions. The image leading off the post was taken from my driveway looking across the street. I liked the way the rays fall on and color the snow-covered pavement.

When I got back into the house and noticed that the majority of pictures were quite dark (again, it was just before and after sunrise), a thought occurred to me. I remembered that my version of Photomatix -- software that melds up to three different exposures of the same composition to form a singular, high-dynamic range (HDR) image -- allows me to make copies of a single image then designate exposures of two of three images to be adjusted as if they had been shot at various increments (of my choosing). Essentially, it's an artificial way to meld three "different" exposures of the same composition if you only have one exposure to work with.

I had never used Photomatix to do that with a full shoot before because I normally use my digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera when I compose extensive landscape photos. I prefer to make my own multiple exposures at the point of shoot. I delved into this feature of the software for the first time Thursday morning with my single-frame iPhone X shots of the snowfall, and the images you see in this post are the result.

I did very little other editing of the photos; I boosted all of the "green" color saturations in each image (Photomatix allows users to adjust the strength of various colors at the end of processing), and I occasionally increased lighting (but only slightly), but that's about it. Photomatix did the rest.

Above and below: The same neighbor's house taken from different angles. Above, you can spot the colored burst of sun rays behind the home. Moving down the road a bit, there's nothing blocking the sun anymore, not even the trees. 

 Above and below are two slightly different angles of my street, looking up a hill.

Above: Sun rays hit the top portion of the trunk of this tree in my backyard.

Elsewhere in my backyard, my big-people swing looks chillingly isolated (above). The fence you see in the background above is pictured below at much closer range. If you look closely at the left side of the fence in the image below, you can catch spots of orange sun rays bouncing against it.  

Shots integrating the sun or its rays, or the sun's reflections and shadows on the snow were my favorites in the shoot from Wednesday morning. Above, you can see the sun peeking thinly through a couple trees, casting the tapestry of lines, brightness, color and shadows on the driveway. A closeup of the driveway appears below.  

Above: A spot of light and color splashing the midsection of a house front.

Weird sky/cloud formations

Early Sunday evening, I noticed some weird cloud formations -- or, perhaps, contrails/jet streams? -- in the west/southwestern sky while I was outdoors and happened to have my PowerShot G12 with me, so I took some pictures. Turns out ... I had a short window of opportunity to lock in on a color shade, as the setting sun and/or its reflected rays transformed the color of these formations from the usual bright white to a bronze tint in a span of 10 minutes or so during the time I was observing and photographing.

There probably is a perfectly good explanation for these helter-skelter patterns, and they probably are contrails. But of these streaks looked too wide and splayed for jet streams, and yet ... too narrow and too tubular for clouds. 

I did a quick hunt online, and not surprisingly found that weird cloud formations are not usual, but in the pictures of examples of "weird cloud formations," I didn't see any examples that resembled these helter-skelterlike skyscapes!

The image at the top is a broad overview of the spectacle; the one immediately below is a somewhat tighter look at the same composition. Both were taken before the aforementioned bronzing effect, the first of which you can see in the portrait orientation two shots below.

Above and the next two below: After the sunset/bronzing effect took hold. That tiny black figure to the right of the formation on the left is a passing aircraft. A crop of the above frame to bring out better detail of the aircraft appears below.

 

 

Above: This is not entirely a sunset bronzing effect; while I did capture this after the sunset started tinkering with the cloud colors, it's also the result of a PowerShot G12 in-camera melding of three images captured in rapid succession (also known as high-dynamic range, or HDR).