People who know me personally understand that I complain a lot about the weather in the Midwest. I find the mostly gray days of winter to be very depressing. I don’t mind cold and snow. I do mind day after day of gray, featureless skies. However the one thing that I dislike the most about the Midwest (the weather) often yields amazing photo opportunities. The snowstorm that hammered the East Coast mostly missed the Midwest, and yesterday’s bright sun warmed the ground enough to cause evening fog. Overnight, though, temperatures dropped below the dew point, thus causing an amazing display of frost to appear by morning.

Frosty Morning

Frosty mornings such as this don’t last very long. Once the sun is out, the frost either melts or flakes off and quickly disappears. I managed to get out before the frost was gone, and captured some amazing pictures. Frost is made up of ice crystals, and a chilly morning such as today really demonstrates how these ice crystals grow. They seemed to have formed in the direction from which the wind was flowing. Therefore the frost was thick at a forest edge, but once inside the trees there was very little crystal growth.

Frosty Teasel

Fortunately here in rural Indiana there is no shortage of open fields, so it wasn’t hard to find places that had open exposure to the wind. If we had more sunny, soft lit days such as this, I would enjoy the winter months more. However the weather here changes fast, and even during my short morning walk the clouds rolled in. Still the thin clouds provided soft lighting which is often good for photography.

Goodbye Blue Skies

One fun aspect of being out in the woods in the early morning is the opportunity to see wildlife. I saw deer tracks everywhere in the snow, so I wasn’t surprised to see a few had stopped on their daily rounds to watch me. This is deer hunting territory, so I’m sure the deer were very leery of me. They did stick around for a while though and eventually walked off. The only hardware I shoot is a camera, so they had nothing to fear on this frosty morning.

They're Watching

To see more pictures of this photowalk, click on the thumbnails below.