(no subject)

[brooksmoses]

ritaxis was recently asking about winter weather in the Appalacians and what the land felt like and looked like, and it occurred to me that I usually take photographs when I'm home in Virginia for Christmas, and those might be useful. And that the rest of you might be interested in seeing them, too, since I was going to crop and upload them anyway.

So I went through my old digital photo albums, and pulled out a selection. I believe these were all taken from the front steps of my mother's house, over several years, in all sorts of weather.

So, in roughly chronological order:

---

(2003-12-2?) A very typical sunny winter day. Probably somewhere around 50F, not too windy.

---

(2003-12-2?) This isn't the best of pictures, but it's the best I have for showing what the mountainsides look like, and the color of the bare trees and the mountain behind them. There's a tiny patch of snow hiding in the shady spot on the left side of the picture, too.

---

(2003-12-2?) Much like the first picture, but the light balance on the clouds is a bit better.

---

(2003-12-2?) This is the same mountainside, about four days earlier when there was about six inches of snow on the ground.

---

(2003-12-2?) And the same day, looking at the woods over to the left.

---

(2003-12-2?) Snow! Flakes nearly the size of dimes, where the usual six-sided flakes had clumped together into plates that slowly fall, big enough to show up clearly in the photo.

---

(2003-12-2?) More of the snow.

---

(2004-01-05) Clouds at sunset. Winter sunsets seem to always be glorious, and the sun sets almost directly in the middle of the valley. This was only a couple of weeks after the snow in the previous pictures.

---

(2004-12-13) This was after a heavy afternoon rain. The clouds were just beginning to clear, and the light through them made the distant meadows glow like gems &mdash the picture only begins to capture the effect.

---

(2004-12-13) The same view as above, with the exposure adjusted to show the foreground more clearly.

---

(2005-01-04) This is from a different place -- my mother-in-law's front porch, about thirty miles away. It's down in a valley rather than on a mountaintop, but the overall look of the land is about the same. The differences in greenness between mowed lawn and meadow are fairly easy to see.

---

(2006-01-02) Finally, some heavy low-hanging snow clouds, just a little before sunset.