a little wild   (a small slice of wildlife)

A white Christmas!  It would be wrong to miss the chance for a walk in the woods right after a snowfall.  I apologize if there are too many photos here; the fresh snow brings out so much beauty.

Winter insects are always a thrill.  Here’s a winter stonefly,  If you want to learn more about them: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/winter-stoneflies-sure-are-supercool/.

One of the biggest attractions today was the sun shining on the droplets on the branches, setting them afire.  However, photographing that posed a challenge: what was scintillating to the eye disappeared in the photos, as the droplets were too small and the highlights were cut, so the brilliance was lost, for the most part.  This is a typical photo:

By accident, I found that one way to sometimes compensate for this was to take photos out of focus — in retrospect, I suspect everyone else already knew this, but it was fun to experiment with.  Here’s pretty much scene as the previous photo, but out of focus:

I’ve often mentioned that I’m obsessed with photographing this particular view:

Here’s a boulder that clearly is not enjoying the snowstorm 😦

And here’s an occasion where the droplets in the sunlight did in fact display themselves well:

I don’t apologize for my time exposures of the stream, cliched or not!  But it’s nice to find a new twist on this approach.  Today, the sun was reflected on the bustling flow, so the exposures had a fresh look.

And finally, the sun was low enough that I could take backlit photos of this eccentric icicle, with the sun in the background: