|
Persistence pays off I guess. I've been wanting to get sundogs or pillars out of this cold crap, and it's not been happening. It finally does on this early outing, though not when I was expecting it. First off, the models pretty much nailed this frigid night several days ahead of time. I sent someone an e-mail on it 5 days before it happened, saying, wow look at Thursday morning on the GFS model. The RUC nailed it last night as well(that model only goes out 12 hours). The NAM model on the other hand blew it. 0z ruc run said -20F to -25F by morning in western IA and ne Nebraska. 0z NAM run for the same time frame was saying 0F or so. Can't be too good when your model starts off the following morning that far off. So betting on -10F overnight and hoping for the -20F instead, I thought I'd make an all nighter and see if I could get the whole plant cloud production thing again, but this time for a longer time. 2 a.m. comes around and I'm not liking that idea. I had to sleep. So I went to bed a little after 2 and set the alarm for 5...wonderful. It goes off, I wake up and check surface obs. Tekamah I think was -17F already. It's a little hard convincing yourself to go out into -20F air after 3 hours of sleep. I looked outside and wasn't seeing any signs of plant clouds being produced. Great. I head out anyway, to see what I could find. The plant was not doing the whole cloud thing at this time. So I drove over to Wilson Island and shot the above and below images. Oh yeah , Wayne NE was -23F....some station east of Sioux City was reporting -26F. I think Onawa IA got down to -20F. Mapleton made it to -25F. Tekamah got to -20F and is only 17 miles away. Where this Wilson Island and Desoto Bend is located, out in the middle of the flats between the bluffs in IA and those in NE....I'm sure it was at least -20F while I was shooting this(middle of the flats away from towns is as good as it gets). Steam production off the icy river was much greater than the other -10F to -15F morning last week too, so I know it was colder.
|
|
It's 9pm as I type this, and my hands still feel hot, thanks to having the crap froze out of them. They almost feel blistery. The only way I can describe -20F to those that have never felt it, is to think of 5F(if you've felt that I guess). 5F is rather cold....bitter. Now chop 25 degrees off that(yeah yeah I'm a "genius"). It certainly wasn't taking very long to create pain in my hands and feet. I made numerous trips back to the van to keep from losing fingers and toes over this. It's rather difficult to shoot with a glove on, so normally I don't have a glove on at least one hand. I tried to keep the shutter around 4-5 seconds as that gave the cooler blur look to the ice-chunks. I adjusted the ISO speed as needed, getting less and less as it got lighter and lighter(obviously). It was over an hour before sunrise when I got there, so it was still dark...though the bright moon helped.
|
|
Oh yeah, the moon was super bright as I was driving there, before I was in the steam/fog. I was like, yeeesh, that's a blinder right now. It looked almost surreal. I'm shooting these from a dock...a dock that was horribly slick thanks to being covered in frost. That white flat area there that looks like ground, well it's not. The dock was frozen in that ice. I really wanted to get closer to the river, but had no desire to walk on that.
|
|
Looking southeast from the dock. Sun just about to rise.
|
|
I really don't get why there was this gap of lesser fog there. You can see it in the earlier ones above too.
|
|
Wind shifted just a hair and now I was more in the fog. Still blows my mind it can get cold enough that ice water creates lots of steam. It gives a kind of warm feel looking at it. But the fact is with that sort of water creating it, well, it was uber freaking cold.
|
|
Fearing I would miss sundogs as the sun rose, I left my cool scene and drove back out of the park. I found an opening and waited the couple minutes for the sun to rise.
|
|
No sundogs again! Aaargh I thought. Then as it came up more I was like, damn, this looks freaking sweet.
|
|
I have a love hate relationship with quickly changing cool scenes. You want to be everywhere and shooting everything at once, all while your conditions change on you. I wanted to shoot the sun, this steam, and that scene back at the river. The best one can do is use their time wisely. I used up all but the last couple minutes before the sun was to rise, then came here. I was prepared to race back in if there were no sundogs, but I kept having to stop to shoot the unfolding scene.
|
|
|
|
I've found this lens/or camera doesn't always care for objects right in front of the sun when zoomed in. It will yellow or red fringe the crap out of the object's edges...like it is doing to the top of that tree. It seems that cheap Kodak I had been using handled the sun better(minus horrible purple fringing). This lens just seems strange sometimes with the edge of the sun and the gradient to it. Perhaps it can all be chalked up to various shooting conditions too(like maybe I had better ones with that cheap Kodak and worse ones so far with this one...probably just the lens).
|
|
Now it's handling the edge of the sun better. Probably contrast related while the sun is behind fog or moisture, since it is less so in the above. I bet that is it. Much like what happens to dark objects like trees in front of the sun..their edges color fringe.
|
