I was out watcing airplanes with the toddlers the other day when I spotted this neat effect in the plumes across the river.

Notice how the steam from the power plant hits a certain level, then veers off horizontally. The billows rising from the refinery are doing something totally different, and reaching higher in this instance. It reminds me of a late night photo I got of the refinery and power plant from Highway 1804 north of Bismarck. The steam from the refinery was forming a horizontal line straight south, and the power plant’s steam was heading straight north. I’ll have to look that one up later.

This is a result of the steam hitting a layer of air with a different temperature (and, I presume, a resulting change in pressure). Yes, I did take some astronomy and meteorology in college, but I’m sorry to say I don’t remember many specifics. It makes for a neat photograph, though.

I found myself chasing some more of those spires of light due to ice fog, much like the ones I posted earlier (click here). Sadly, the conditions have to be just right to catch something like that. In this case they were not. I still got some neat photos, though.

Here’s the new bridge in winter time. The snow on the river makes for a nice, soft foreground…don’t you agree?

The fog has been rolling in quite heavily lately as our weather pattern is undergoing some changes and very different blobs of air meet. In fact, I was atop the capitol building today and was just about up in the clouds!

I hear we have a cold snap around the corner. If we have some high pressure delivering clear skies and very frigid (sub-zero) temperatures, we could get more of those light spikes soon too!

It’s been a neat couple of days, weather wise…especially for a photographer. Sadly, I have not been able to get out and explore all the frosted goodness in our area. I’m not complaining; I took a long photo trip on Saturday morning. Yet I still would like to go out and see what unique sights I can find with all the ice in the air lately!

Last night I stopped at the capitol on the way home from the Wizards game. I had been craving some nice salty Sta-Mart popcorn all day, so it all worked out quite handily.

You know it’s frosty out when your chain link fence frosts shut! The chain link canopies of the walkways on local overpass bridges were turned into tunnels as well. I imagine there are lots of neat old tractors and that kind of thing around our area that look really neat in a blanket of thick, jagged frost! I don’t foresee an opportunity to find out, at least not this time.

Now comes news of an impending snow storm. Cool. Finally, some North Dakota winters the way I remember them as a kid!

I’ve been out enjoying the recent warm weather and clear skies, just mostly with one or both of my toddlers instead of my camera. Of course I typically have the camera bag with me, but I’m just not out on photo trips right now. These little fellas get more fun with each passing day, and I look forward to them being old enough to go hiking and shooting and things with their Daddy.

Here’s a slightly more comprehensive list of ways to enjoy a warm, sunny break in the cold of a January winter:

– clean the Garage Majal. I even vacuumed in all the corners of my man cave, going through at least two movies on the DVD player. I put in a bigger TV, too…but the refrigerator needs to be stocked with fresh Dew.

– bring my wife a rose at work. Girls like that kind of thing! I’m still sneezing from the flower shop, though.

– remove ice from the sidewalks. Whether it’s by ice chopper or by giant torch, getting rid of stubborn ice spots now will pay off when it gets cold and blustery again. Especially with two year olds using the sidewalk!

– Work. Holy cow have we been busy. Now that I’m not in television, I mostly work bankers’ hours…but there have been some evening shoots lately. The winter sun can be a challenge, so if you can’t control it, wait for it to go away. I was shooting in a building with a lot of windows, and sunlight streaming in made it impossible to balance the lighting correctly. Thus I made the call to shoot after dark, and the results were fantastic.

– surprise my wife with a clean kitchen. She wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. I have the kind of hard working wife who can’t shake the fact that there’s a chore left to do, so imagine the load lifted when she woke up and the chore didn’t need to be done!

– be Daddy. I took my two year old to the airport last night to ride the escamalators (sic) and watch a couple of jets take off. He carried around the miniature pack of M&Ms that I gave him, since he had to wait until after dinner.

– write. I haven’t done any blogging since the Monday announcement, but I have polished up a magazine article and wrote a brief outline for an op-ed I might shop around in a week or two. I also occasionally contribute to some video / photo / animation forums, and recently there have been some questions posted which I can answer.

– maintenance. I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio tightening clamps on light stands and tripods, cleaning cameras, tuning boom poles, and other basic maintenance. I also came up with an improvement for our crane rig, one which allowed me to get some unconventional shots you’ll probably see on TV in the next couple of weeks.

– exercise. I did this in the form of chopping all the compacted snow/ice off our driveways. Fun. It was a solid 45 minutes of work, got the blood pumping, and I left one garage door open with a movie going as entertainment.

– play in the snow. This one hasn’t been accomplished yet, but I plan to take my little towheads out sledding or to make a snow fort and snowman. I even bought two new purple snow-block makers to assist in the task. That may have to be a Saturday plan so I can take them out during the warmest part of the day.

– Photography! I’m itching for this one, too. With the holidays and other things going on, my hobby has taken a back seat. It isn’t that there’s nothing to photograph in Bismarck or Mandan, that’s for sure. Hopefully over the weekend I can venture out and find something neat with the camera.

Enjoy the warm weather! Compact some snow and throw it at someone you love, or build something, or just get outside and exercise. I’ll post some more fun photos soon, including some I’ve been sitting on: a homemade P-51 Mustang airplane replica that seats one and is powered by a Geo Metro engine!

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

I’m always giddy to use a line from my favorite Carl Sandburg poem, thus the title. And on cat feet it came, only this time it was ice fog instead of the traditional kind. It left just as slyly, leaving me only one location to try to grab a few shots of its remarkable effects!

With an otherwise crystal-clear sky, the airborne crystals of this ice fog turned any bright light source into a blazing spire piercing the darkness above Bismarck-Mandan. In some places with enough bright light sources close together, the sight was reminiscient of aurora borealis!

I noticed these by accident, keeping true with my typical modus operandi: stumble into the right place at the right time, with my camera in my possession. Why do you think my motto is, “it’s better to be lucky than good?” I had stepped out to run an errand for my wife when I saw this phenomenon in the sky, and I took quick advantage of it. I’m glad I was timely in doing so; within twenty minutes, the ice fog has gone. Little cat feet, indeed.