Snow Shadow of a Tree

Yesterday we had most unusual weather that I have ever seen here in South-Western Ontario. It was a beautiful sunny morning with temperature hovering around freezing point. Then, within few seconds, no exaggeration, we got hit by a blizzard that reduced visibility to about 30 yards and covered lawn in a blanket of snow. Just as suddenly the clouds disappeared and it was sunny again. When I looked outside I noticed that all the snow has melted except in shadows. That is when I spotted the tree clearly outlined by snow. By the time I grabbed my camera, adjusted all settings and shot couple of frames the snow that laid where small branches were has already melted. Two minutes after this shot all the snow was gone. We got few more one-minute blizzards after that but I have not seen the shadows again. Still, I consider myself very lucky to see this.

Early Morning Snow

 Cat on a prawl. It must be tough existence to be a stray cat in Canadian winter.

Steady pace of this cat made beautiful footprint pattern in the snow.

Update: 8 hours later...

and 24 hours later.

Update to Interesting Shadows

Photography is painting with light but this shadow saga is getting really confusing for somebody like me that doesn’t know too much about modern vapour lights.

I did some searching on the Net and discovered that the lower blue spotlight is most likely mercury vapour light and the orange street light above it is sodium vapour light. OK, not much to it, except: that blue light casts orange shadow and orange light casts blue shadow! I will have to communicate with somebody that designs street lighting to find out why the colors are reversed.

You can see from this projection that higher orange street light’s shadow is in front and blue spotlight’s shadow is in back…

…yet the shadow colors are reversed! Why?!?