This will be more pictoral than verbal. We've had several days now of fog with unseasonably warm temperatures. (Spoiler: it ends very soon. A deep freeze is coming.) I spent a bit of today outside with my camera, after discovering this morning how icy everything was. Not hoar-frost icy, but watch-your-damn-step! icy. It was a freezing fog. I had to sprinkle salt on the porch steps and the path to the car, in near pitch black dark except for what was picked up and bounced around by the droplets, to get to my job. The drive takes me up a steep hill. But fortunately there is a longer, shallower slope back entrance, which I'd studied ahead of time. If we get solid ice, I'll stay home. It's understood at the job.
A bit later in the morning I got the camera out, since I had about an hour to kill at one point. There were some places I'd had in the back of my mind to shoot, given the opportunity. First spot was the local lake, just a check on visibility and the craziness of folks out in their fish houses, considering how high temps had just been for days.
The horizontal ice stripes were mostly narrow bands of re-frozen melt water close to shore. But a bit further out were two ice houses, somehow lightweight enough for the ice to hold them. The one on the left is shown on runners, the other flat on ice. Fog hides other details including color and backdrop. I happen to know there are trees in a direct line behind them, as they are tucked in a bay, but it's early in the day yet. The weather forecaster claims the fog will be gone in about another hour from this point.
A few miles along the road is a well used boat launch, at least in summer. Over a half dozen vehicles were parked there today already, but none so stupid as to have hauled a standard ice house out on the lake. The color of this one is almost beginning to show the deep blue tent it is made of, while fog is thinning enough to reveal a side of the bay and the point behind it. Water levels, well frozen, are low enough to allow one to walk out on concrete lanes down into the lake, so my angle is about ten feet from shore.
Just a few degrees to the left are two more, much closer, with the land behind forming the bay more visible. Somebody is working on putting up the support poles for their tent - the red - while closer to the far shore is a modest square blue. Either the blue was unattended or its occupant content to sit inside, likely on one of the ubiquitous 5 gallon plastic buckets used both for hauling in/out, and sitting meantime.
If I turn fully left and zoom to the next spit of land you can see where a supply of summer docks have been pulled out to wait through winter. Well before fishing opener in the spring they will be anchored back in the lake, jutting out from shore where boat owners pay for slips for the season they can walk to from their cars, or even their back doors. Another bay opens on the other side of this spit of land, again too far to spy through the fog. The white along the shore on this side is likely where snow drifted on the ice and didn't fully melt in the latest warm spell.
It was finally time to try a different spot. I've been waiting for the perfect lighting to catch the shot I wanted, for several years now. There's no lake here, just a drop to the highway below, and one old tree which is having a difficult time deciding whether it is going to die outright or just a bit and spring back with new growth from the trunk. Those are not vines clinging to it. It has a rather cluttered background, with office buildings, a motel, signs, large trees, and steady highway traffic. Fog is a must for a shot of it, isolating it enough so it can stand out and show it's own unique beauty.
One of the medical buildings on this side of the tree uses the nearby ground under it for snow removal from their parking lot. Of course it's not completely necessary to showing off the tree,though the angle showing the snow is otherwise more effective.
Next summer the clinging red/brown leaves will be replaced by green ones should the tree survive another winter, the trees across the highway will be solid green, and you'll almost have to know this tree is there to see it... and its beauty.
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