White-Out

Al...can you share the camera, lens, and settings you used for these pics?

Nothing fancy, Jim, just a Canon PowerShot A75 digital with a puny by today's standards 3.2 megapixels and vanilla 3X zoom lens. I have a fancier Canon with lots of special lenses, but I just grabbed this handy little guy for these shots. I did massage the photos a bit with an editor.

Well done Al

Thanks for sharing the pictures Al. The scenery the weather creates is the one thing I love the most about winter. I have a number of photos I took with a cheap digital camera; sometimes they are best to enjoy the moment, without being caught up with the settings.

Al, wasn't that fantastic? I could hardly believe my eyes. And it was three mornings in a row!

Great pictures!

There is actually a name for this phenomenon, but I can't recall it...

I went out of get some pictures, and as you noted, the effect was very localized. One tree looked like it was fully leafed out with ice crystals, and a quarter of a mile away - nothing. I was puzzling about the variables - altitude, wind deflection...

I decided to revel in its beauty.

Thanks for documenting this beauty, and bringing to the foreground, Al.

Best to you and your family, Al.

Jeff...I think it's called hard rime. I also saw this driving my oldest daughter back from college a few weeks ago. However, what was most surreal, and I wish I had my camera with me, was that in one section in SE WI, only the SW side of the trees in this one forest had the hard rime on it. It looked like an artist pained only half the painitng.

Jeff: Thank you very much. Not to get overly technical because as you say, one should revel in the beauty, but the conditions for the ice crystal deposits to form are very critical. It requires little wind (Jim, your "half-painting' probably was on the sides of the trees away from the prevailing wind.)--not none, though. The temperature and humidity have to be just right to create supercooled (cooled below the freezing point) water droplets that are wafted by a gentle breeze onto tree branches and freeze on contact.

Al - Beautiful!

These images are not only breathtakingly beautiful, they're also an accurate and honest representation of reality. Compared to the various ideological interpretations (distortions) of reality we are frequently exposed to by the various contributors at LLC blogs, I find this one to be a refreshing Contrast.