Cold heart

It's rather late, so I'm going to keep this one short and sweet. As we ate lunch in our office, I asked Yoshi what I should take pictures of today (and by "asked" I mean "sort of whined in hopes I'd sound pathetic enough that he'd do my thinking for me"). His suggestion: the ice that's almost completely covered our casting pond. That worked for me.

I'd already taken a few photographs of this reed when I realized that if I shot it from a slightly different angle, the reed and its shadow formed the shape of a heart:



Autofocus can be a tricky thing at times, especially when both the foreground and the background are busy enough to offer a variety of targets for the camera to choose from; there have been many times when, much to my chagrin, the camera decided to switch its focus from a bird to, say, the trees or brush behind it. Such was the case when I was attempting to photograph some red branches against the ice, and this time along it resulted in a pair of photos that made for an interesting comparison.

Since I rarely use a tripod, and as a rule keep my camera set to shoot continuously as long as I hold the button down (the better to try and snag one a good action shot), most of the time I'll take several photos of a subject at once even if it's completely motionless. One photo in the bunch is usually a bit sharper than all the rest, because while I'll never be able to consciously hold my hands perfectly steady for a single shot, there will still be split seconds as I shoot when it happens naturally. But while I photographed the branches, there was a moment when the camera shifted focus between one image and the next. So in one picture, the branch in the foreground is nice and sharp:



And in the very next, it's the snow-speckled ice that's crystal clear. I find it kind of interesting to flip back and forth between the two. But as I said it's a bit late, and I'm getting punchy:



Finally, I took this one over where the water flows into the pond, as it hasn't quite been cold enough long enough to freeze water that still has a hint of movement to it: