Fascinated by Soap Bubbles

End of January in the North Country... and you know what that means: frigid cold temperatures! 

And 2021 did not disappoint in that regard. We had a multi-day cold spell with subzero temperatures outside, so even the inside of our (wind-protected) porch was cold enough for the "frozen soap bubbles experiment" that I wanted to try since I read about it. There are plenty of instructions out there how to make abstract/macro shots with soap bubbles while they are slowly freezing over with interesting ice crystal structures. But I wanted to use a different lighting idea with my color LED tubes below a translucent bowl filled with snow. After some optimizing over the course of three nights I found my style. And very cold fingers in the process as this can take a while.... You see, not every attempt is successful: bubbles don't form, bubbles burst on contact with the snow, bubbles don't form crystals in the right place etc, etc.... And then it's about 30 seconds or until they freeze over. But it was worth all the pain and I am finding more and more gems while processing the results. 

For my photos, I used this exposure starting point: Manual mode, Tripod-mounted using cable release, Aperture = f/9 (best compromise for globe sharpness and background blur), Exposure < 1/2 sec (depending on light intensity), ISO = 800 (above that noise becomes noticeable).

Here are some examples from the three nights. The second one has some photoshop snow globe effect added (I could not resist to try this at least once).

There are many more images here: https://www.magiclens.net/Collections/Special-Topics/Macro-Topics/  Enjoy!

Winter Hikes

Getting a real winter hike this month is a challenge. The snow cover is only minimal... or so we thought. But the situation in the mountains is different. After a fresh 2+ inches over night, the northern part of the Long Trail proved to be an amazing choice for an outing. Here are a few impressions...

Find the trail marker! The challenges of a winter hike on the Long Trail

Brook along the Long Trail

Same brook, different view

Holiday Cards

Our photogroup's challenge for this month was to find non-cliché Holiday motives. So I was hunting for scenes typical for the season, but that did not involve lots of lights, Christmas trees or wrapped gift boxes. I have added one angel, though. Then I added greeting texts to some of them and uploaded the results here. I am not sure if these are really non-cliché, but if you find them nice enough, feel free to download and use in your own holiday e-greetings. If you'd like higher resolution, just shoot me an email!

Barn Series

These are a few shots back from late winter/early spring of 2016. The little bit of snow we had this winter is gone, but the blue skies make photography interesting despite the drab ground colors.

The farm with the silos can be found on the Lake Champlain Islands along the West Shore Road in Alburg, while the other barn photos were taken right here in Westford during some of our local walks along Huntley Road and Cambridge Road.

Red and Blue make for a good combination, despite the missing white :-)

First Snow

First Snow (Smugglers Notch, VT)

First Snow II (Smugglers Notch, VT)
Still experimenting to find the right settings of LR/Blog export plugin, but I am getting there... This post shows two images from late October when we drove up Smugglers Notch for a short walk. The first snow made for a beautiful contrast to the yellow/orange leaves at that altitude.

Restart

Christmas Tree (Casa Crana, 2016)
As I am still experimenting with how to best publish/showcase some of my photos, I have started and then stopped this blog. Now I have decided to give it another try. I am not really ready to hand off the copyrights of all my hard work to Facebook, Flickr and the like.

Suiting the time of the year, I'll start with this photo that shows our own tree this year. A lot has happened and I plan to write about that later and also post older photos in the future. Keep coming back!

Burlington Waterfront

OK. It is December, but winter is nowhere to be found this year. While going through my photos from the past year, I stumbled across this January scene taken next to the Burlington Fishing Pier. Now THIS is winter! It was a Sunday afternoon, so the photo was taken against the sun. I took three exposures back then and just now developed them with my new HDR tool, Aurora HDR (by macphun and Trey Ratcliff). I am getting a hang of it and will probably do most of my HDR work with this one from now on...

For this particular scene, I selected a rather dreamy preset and went from there.