Ice Baby Ice!

Our driveway ... even with the new gravel from last year was pure ice Saturday morning!

YakTraks were in order!

So for most of Saturday night and most of the Sunday we were encased in ice and fog with dense fog predicted through Monday forenoon.

I went to get Saturday's mail and was struck by how cool the forest looked.

The tree below is one I followed last year. It is a Hop Hornbeam tree that generally keeps some of its leaves through the winter. This year wicked winds stripped them.

The fog was thick and the road was iced.

It was a fine day to stay off the roads.

I did venture down into our creek bottom and enjoyed some bird watching through the dim light. I walked on the ice as it was easier than walking on the rocks.

Some think cold, damp, and foggy days are awful. I think of it as having Mother Nature is a soft light box.

It is dismal looking in a way. But sometimes one can find beautiful things. 

I am very lucky to be surrounded by an interesting landscape.

The temperatures warmed up quite a bit during the day and some of the ice melted down almost enough for me to be able to drive up the hill if I needed to.

That said, even though it was a pain to so many people. I liked our fog and ice.

Fogged!

This was my driveway looking up towards the ridge and mailbox and back towards the house in the dense fog on Wednesday.

I think of this tree as the Little  Haiku Tree. It is invisible in the summer when hidden by greenery.

These Grey Dogwood seed pods were ice covered on Wednesday.

Foggy Forest scene.

I'm just loving this mix of weather. I know it looks dreary and awful but I like it when the weather is odd and strange.

I wonder if I lived in a city or a suburb, if I could find enchantment with fog and ice. 

Thursday was fog and rain. I went out in the morning to grab the mail and then later down into the creek bottom. The creek was still covered in knee deep snow except in places where it trickled over the rocks.

I found a large north facing rock outcrop that had frost on the rock face along with moss. This was thanks to Charlie who took a detour and led me past this spot.

The rain started coming down pretty hard while I was in the creek. I'm thankful to have an Olympus weather sealed camera and lens.

The snow had fallen off a log the crosses the creek and I was able to grab some rain drop shots of the moss holding droplets.

The rain got pretty intense so I headed back up the hill towards home.

I met the mules in the another section I'd let them into. They were digging through the snow and eating some of the long grasses that they left this summer.

After their hay and grain, they wander off to find 'goodies' in the forest. This is the first year I've let them do this and I am finding that they will eat the leaves off from weeds and multi flora rose plants that they won't touch in the warmer months.

They are half donkey and donkeys are browsers. So this seems to be a pretty good thing for them.

I had a lot of outer wear to hang up in the basement to dry when I got home.

We may see the sun shine again by Sunday afternoon. Hang in there, decent weather will come again.
However I am grateful that it isn't 99 degrees and smokey. 
So there is that.

Rudolph and Christmas Eve

Rudolph: Well, the deer said I should go into the dark woods and look for magic mushrooms. 

These look pretty magical, do I eat them 
all?

Whoops....
 

The Reindeer King:  Awaken Rudolph! You have been transformed 

and can now do your duty on 

Santa's Sleigh!

Rudolph: Wait, wow! What? Hey look at my big red glowing nose! It worked! It worked

                 But I feel like I am in a dream!

The Reindeer King: No dream, but you didn't have to have so many mushrooms.

Rudolph: Wow, I feel magnificent. I can see things too. Wow Dude!

King: It's Christmas eve my son. Time to get back to Santa and the other Reindeer. So many have
been searching for you.
Go now!
No time to lose!

Faking it

With new advances in technology, it is getting harder and harder to tell a plain old photo compared one that was taken 'out in the real' world.
I prefer hiking to the ridge and enjoying what Mother Nature provides in the morning and not what I think it should be like.

Some new photo editing programs offer something called Skyswap. It is all over the place. You can find it on PicsArt and BeFunky to name a couple of on line photo editing apps.

ON1 offers it also. No, I am not paid to mention them. I just use the program because it is easy and fast.

I generally do NOT use it.
Here is a sample of the real shot and then the SkySwap added in.

Original photo.

SkySwapped.

Is it cheating? Oh yes, I think if I claimed the above shot as the original photo I couldn't live with myself. However I would love to see a sky like that with a foggy atmosphere. It is pretty rare to get so much color in our area with so much dense fog. 

But.
There is the Butt.

It makes my eyebrows go up when I see the comparison. It makes it prettier with more color.

But.

It is still cheating.

One more cheat.

Original.

Skyswapped.

Next I'll address the fun stuff. I wrote a series of books for my grandkids at one time regarding my dog Morris and his toys that were 'alive'. I always was looking for a way to make the photos in the books to look more like illustrations.

In order to do that, I had to delve into the wild world of radical edits. At the time I settled on making the photos a bit oversimplified and a bit more colorful. Here is one of Morris's toys having a discussion with one of our Dexter cows. 
The original photo had 3 lines of hot wires in it that I had to clone out. That was a very hard job to do.

In this era of editing fun, I depended quite a bit on the Topaz software. Their plugin with Simplify was what I used a lot for trying to make photos look more like colorful drawings.

That was so much fun!

So I've been playing with an idea of making a story with my little characters. For fun I decided to just pick something small and go for it.

For those who don't work with programs and edits, the below is a sample of how much more advanced masking and editing have become over the years.

I recall trying to extract one thing out of an image years ago. The process was lengthy and painstaking. More often than not it took me so much time and effort, that I'd have to save the work and then go back to it.

Sometimes it would even freeze up my computer.

Newer programs allow a person to indicate in red what they want to get rid of and use green to keep.

It works best with high contrast images.

I isolated the little figure and now it was part of the image below it. But it doesn't look too 'real' even if the world around the figure is 'unreal'.

I added some effects and changed the colors up a bit.

This was a fun exercise. 

See what happens when I am stuck inside? 

No worries. 

I did my chores first and froze about 3 lbs of green beans, washed windows, dealt with Charlie hair, made hubby lunch, and then caught the goat who got out of his pen and pulled some geraniums out of planters...

All in a rainy, moody, dreary, cloudy day.

I can't wait for the nicer weather we are supposed to have this week!

We have plenty of mud to go around and the yard is growing like crazy again. We could do with a week without rain.

Have a great Monday.