Hoar Frost on the Birch Tree

Last night leaving from work I pulled my ice scraper out and scraped the frost off of my windows. However, the air was full of moisture and it was practically freezing and before too long I was back to the start, my windshield was frosted up again and nothing could help but blasting washer fluid and getting enough hot air to blow out of my windshield defrosters. In fact, the weather was perfect for the formation of hoar frost!

I woke up this morning to a gray day, but the woodlot in front of our house was frosted and usual this makes a very pretty scene.

So, I broke out my camera gear and started to shoot some panorama photos and then decided to get close up and when I started to look closely at our birch tree I noticed the frost was different than usual and was all spiky which is called hoar frost. I quickly changed from my big glass to my macro-lens and went to work.

Macro photography is quickly becoming my favorite photography because you can take a blah image and with the use of the macro lens a dull subject explodes with interesting fine detail and a familiar subject becomes an unexplored world!

The neat thing about macro photography is it is a more technical field and does not necessarily require lots of thought on the composition, the subject’s fine detail speaks on its own. Though lighting, focus, and exposure can be a bit trickier. Other trickiness also depends on your subject and while it might be cool to get a macro shot of a bison’s eye I hardly think photographers attempting that would succeed and would probably end up in the hospital or dead. One does not have to go the extreme I suggest but the point is you need to have cooperative or inanimate subjects.

From the first photo above you can see I need to work on my depth of field. I have the subject in good focus but the background is also too much in focus, I should have opened up the lens some more than what I did.

The last photo I will present to you is from that same birch tree.