Morning, noon, night, or the middle of the night may find me heading outdoors with a camera bag these days. With my Canon EOS Digital Camera, I’m armed for exploring my universe. I always loved to take pictures, and always grieved for the fact my results were often not what I hoped for when I took a risky shot. These days, though, with digital cameras at affordable prices, those risky shots are getting better and better.
I’ve been outside when the temperature was below freezing, but it’s a tough way to get a picture. I’m glad spring is flirting with us all. My family is getting used to my borderline insanity. Supper may be thirty minutes away, but if I look out the window and like the light I’m seeing, I’ll take a walk down the block, or jump in the pick-up and head to Summit bluff (which is only four blocks away), or stroll back into the woods, and snap pictures until I’ve the lost the light I’m so excited about.
Night pictures are hard to take and still come away with something you’re excited about, but there is a night setting on the Digital EOS Camera and I’m getting more and more good results with it. Another setting I’m learning to really appreciate is the sports setting. Usually, now, blurred pictures are not a problem when I frame an action shot through my camera frame.
Friday, February 24th I woke up at 4:30 A.M., looked out my front door and the landscape was absolutely breathtaking. It was snowing, and there was an ethereal light reflecting off all the snow which looked like it had potential. I was in a long flannel nightgown at the time, but the previous day had been shirtsleeves weather so I didn’t see how it could be that cold outside. I slipped on a pair of flip flops, picked up my camera and headed out to the front porch.
I snapped over a hundred pictures in a few minutes, until the tail of my nightgown was wet with the weight of the snow that had melted on it, and was dragging on the ground. If you looked close enough, you could see spring buds on the bushes and trees under the fluffy clumps of wet snow. This has been an unusually mild winter, and for about three weeks already evidence of spring’s first budding promise have been everywhere.
Truthfully, I shut my camera off reluctantly. There was something reverent about it, standing there in the quiet moments of this early spring snowfall, and I felt like Robert Frost, searching for ways to share this silent chapel of snow with everybody. It wasn’t cold. For long moments, I just stood there in my sopping nightgown, soaking up the beauty of this gorgeous night, knowing it for the precious gift it was.