This tiny little tree really appealed to the camera last Saturday, as I visited my friend Bruce and his family to wrestle with Windows on their behalf. I’d wrapped up a cleanup day at our church after an early morning photo trip with Monte, a new photography friend who I met while working as a ringside boom operator for a SHOtime boxing broadcast a while ago. The morning was VERY frosty. When we drove across the new Memorial Bridge, steam was literally billowing over the bridge, swept downriver by the cold, blasting wind.

This little tree reminds me of the tree in Charlie Brown Christmas; perhaps that’s why I like it so much. Standing just over a foot tall, it’s a tough little conifer. My friend’s daughter planted it as part of an Arbor Day project from school last summer, and it has since survived encounters with the lawn mower and an uncle’s tractor tire. It’s a beautiful little tree, especially decked out in a fresh coat of thick frost.

There were many other varieties of trees in Bruce’s yard, each with a different type of needle sporting jagged white frost. I took many photos, and some may appear later, but this was one of my favorites. The frost along the river was VERY thick, but in town there was nothing of the sort.

This is one of the sights Monte and I saw early in the morning. This fencepost juts out of the frozen ground at a neat angle, just north of Horizon Middle School. The top of the post remains parallel to the ground, however, which is why it caught my eye. A thick wood parallelogram with frost-covered loops of rusty barbed wire is a great ingredient for a winter morning photograph!

Regardless of weather, I love getting up and chasing down unique photos. This frost didn’t hang around forever, and it was provided by just the right conditions of warm river water and cold, harsh wind. I may not take the best photos in the world, but I try to make each one indicative of a moment that was unique at the time my shutter clicked. There are plenty of those moments to be had in Bismarck and Mandan, and I’m going to continue to capture my share of them.