It’s been a neat couple of days, weather wise…especially for a photographer. Sadly, I have not been able to get out and explore all the frosted goodness in our area. I’m not complaining; I took a long photo trip on Saturday morning. Yet I still would like to go out and see what unique sights I can find with all the ice in the air lately!

Last night I stopped at the capitol on the way home from the Wizards game. I had been craving some nice salty Sta-Mart popcorn all day, so it all worked out quite handily.

You know it’s frosty out when your chain link fence frosts shut! The chain link canopies of the walkways on local overpass bridges were turned into tunnels as well. I imagine there are lots of neat old tractors and that kind of thing around our area that look really neat in a blanket of thick, jagged frost! I don’t foresee an opportunity to find out, at least not this time.

Now comes news of an impending snow storm. Cool. Finally, some North Dakota winters the way I remember them as a kid!

I’ve been out enjoying the recent warm weather and clear skies, just mostly with one or both of my toddlers instead of my camera. Of course I typically have the camera bag with me, but I’m just not out on photo trips right now. These little fellas get more fun with each passing day, and I look forward to them being old enough to go hiking and shooting and things with their Daddy.

Here’s a slightly more comprehensive list of ways to enjoy a warm, sunny break in the cold of a January winter:

– clean the Garage Majal. I even vacuumed in all the corners of my man cave, going through at least two movies on the DVD player. I put in a bigger TV, too…but the refrigerator needs to be stocked with fresh Dew.

– bring my wife a rose at work. Girls like that kind of thing! I’m still sneezing from the flower shop, though.

– remove ice from the sidewalks. Whether it’s by ice chopper or by giant torch, getting rid of stubborn ice spots now will pay off when it gets cold and blustery again. Especially with two year olds using the sidewalk!

– Work. Holy cow have we been busy. Now that I’m not in television, I mostly work bankers’ hours…but there have been some evening shoots lately. The winter sun can be a challenge, so if you can’t control it, wait for it to go away. I was shooting in a building with a lot of windows, and sunlight streaming in made it impossible to balance the lighting correctly. Thus I made the call to shoot after dark, and the results were fantastic.

– surprise my wife with a clean kitchen. She wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. I have the kind of hard working wife who can’t shake the fact that there’s a chore left to do, so imagine the load lifted when she woke up and the chore didn’t need to be done!

– be Daddy. I took my two year old to the airport last night to ride the escamalators (sic) and watch a couple of jets take off. He carried around the miniature pack of M&Ms that I gave him, since he had to wait until after dinner.

– write. I haven’t done any blogging since the Monday announcement, but I have polished up a magazine article and wrote a brief outline for an op-ed I might shop around in a week or two. I also occasionally contribute to some video / photo / animation forums, and recently there have been some questions posted which I can answer.

– maintenance. I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio tightening clamps on light stands and tripods, cleaning cameras, tuning boom poles, and other basic maintenance. I also came up with an improvement for our crane rig, one which allowed me to get some unconventional shots you’ll probably see on TV in the next couple of weeks.

– exercise. I did this in the form of chopping all the compacted snow/ice off our driveways. Fun. It was a solid 45 minutes of work, got the blood pumping, and I left one garage door open with a movie going as entertainment.

– play in the snow. This one hasn’t been accomplished yet, but I plan to take my little towheads out sledding or to make a snow fort and snowman. I even bought two new purple snow-block makers to assist in the task. That may have to be a Saturday plan so I can take them out during the warmest part of the day.

– Photography! I’m itching for this one, too. With the holidays and other things going on, my hobby has taken a back seat. It isn’t that there’s nothing to photograph in Bismarck or Mandan, that’s for sure. Hopefully over the weekend I can venture out and find something neat with the camera.

Enjoy the warm weather! Compact some snow and throw it at someone you love, or build something, or just get outside and exercise. I’ll post some more fun photos soon, including some I’ve been sitting on: a homemade P-51 Mustang airplane replica that seats one and is powered by a Geo Metro engine!

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

I’m always giddy to use a line from my favorite Carl Sandburg poem, thus the title. And on cat feet it came, only this time it was ice fog instead of the traditional kind. It left just as slyly, leaving me only one location to try to grab a few shots of its remarkable effects!

With an otherwise crystal-clear sky, the airborne crystals of this ice fog turned any bright light source into a blazing spire piercing the darkness above Bismarck-Mandan. In some places with enough bright light sources close together, the sight was reminiscient of aurora borealis!

I noticed these by accident, keeping true with my typical modus operandi: stumble into the right place at the right time, with my camera in my possession. Why do you think my motto is, “it’s better to be lucky than good?” I had stepped out to run an errand for my wife when I saw this phenomenon in the sky, and I took quick advantage of it. I’m glad I was timely in doing so; within twenty minutes, the ice fog has gone. Little cat feet, indeed.

A different kind of ray appears during stormy situations, one that I think is far more beautiful than simple sunlight. The dark clouds form a perfect contrasting background for the light rays escaping the gaps therein. Any humidity in the air gives more life to those rays as they punch through the gloom, and then there are always birds sitting around staring at it and tweeting. That’s where I come in.

For the vertically oriented, here’s another take. These birds sat still for me for several minutes, finally scattering when I turned the truck around to head back toward home. The stoic tree, however remained.

This was the view that greeted me after I came home from a long day trip to Pierre, South Dakota for a video project. I love our HD gear, and I probably should; I selected which gear to purchase when our company decided to go HD! We did mostly driving today, however, with a very little bit of shooting in between. I did stop to take one still picture though:

There were a few of these “dust devils” visible in a field along Highway 1804. They hung in the air long enough for me to go through the internal “do I, don’t I?” before finally pulling the Suburban over to the side of the road to get the shot. Our project manager thought it was cool and our client didn’t mind, so I grabbed my trusty camera and snapped a few shots before moving along.

Several hours of driving, a little bit of shooting, and a pair of pretty decent photos. Yep…good day.

In my last post I mentioned visiting a friend who lived just downstream from the ice jam north of Bismarck. I didn’t get much of a view of it from Fox Island, as it started downstream from the lookout, but from my friend’s backyard the view was a little bit better. I grabbed my camera and banged out a few shots, which I assembled into the panoramic shot you see above. It’s actually pretty hard to see much, although the ice does pile up more on the right side of the shot.

Obviously the photo for his post ain’t the real deal, man…unless you have microscopic vision! The real version is 6000 pixels wide, weighin in at 1.75mb. I don’t want to force anyone to have to download a 1.75mb picture every time they come to this post, so instead I’ll post a link:

Click here to view/download the panoramic image (1.75mb).

If you want to save it to your computer to view in something other than your web browser, simply right-click on that link and use “Save As…” to download a copy.

This is the ice jam that everyone feared during last week’s flooding; the idea was that if this ice jam were to let go, it would send a surge of even more ice and water into an already bad situation downstream. For a while the word had actually gone out that this ice jam had let loose, but fortunately that turned out to be untrue. So far it remains intact, and hopefully it won’t cause any further problems once it lets go. In the mean time, however, it is starting to back up more water and ice behind it, causing distress for residents living upstream.

Double Ditch is one of my favorite sunset spots, particularly this spot next to the fencepost on the north end of the park. The warmth of those summer evenings sure seems the antithesis of today’s scene.

This ice jam is quite nasty, and we sure hope it stays right where it’s at for a while. The last thing we need right now in Bismarck-Mandan is more ice and water coming down the way!

There were plenty of folks with the same idea I had. Double Ditch is a great place to go for some open air regardless of the season, but a spectacle such as this brings even more visitors. You can see some of ’em at the lookout point in the upper right of this picture.

This ice was crackling while I stood at the shore level. That’s kind of spooky considering the force involved in such a wall of ice. I saw that firsthand at the Heart River last week at this time. Again, hopefully this ice jam stays jammed until the river clears up downstream a ways.

I stood in a friend’s back yard today, on the shore near the start of this ice jam. The water level has gone down nearly six feet at his place. He related that these ice jams break free quickly but take a little while to work their way downstream. Sometimes they jam up again. In any case, we’re all hoping for the best here. With more snow on the way, I’m not sure Bismarck-Mandan is out of the woods yet on this whole flooding thing.