First Snow

This is our first winter in the Hudson Valley so I’m not sure if it’s a normal one or not, but I’ve been impatiently waiting for the first real snow of the season for months. I also decided first snow is a good reason to actually start the blog side of this site. I’ve been putting it off for awhile, partially because I don’t like the word blog and have been failing to be clever enough to come up with an alternative, so welcome to what I’m calling Rolls! For the most part, it will just be an outlet for what’s rambling around in my head. The majority of the time it’ll just be photos from the week. Occasionally it might be talking about a piece of kit or some hardware news. If you know me you know I’m prone to geeking out over the next best thing, but I’ll be doing my best to keep that to a minimum. I’ll likely pick on technical details of some photos, but my intention will be to keep it all relevant to the photography.

I woke up this morning and immediately opened the blinds to see how much snow we got overnight. I’m realizing I might have liked the frequent snows in Michigan a little more than I realized, even if I hated the shoveling. After having almost no snowfall last year in North Carolina, I was definitely excited for it today. I woke Rebecca up and asked if she wanted to walk around campus, and after the coffee and breakfast she was awake enough to say yes. I’ve spent the last 6 months walking around Vassar’s campus with a variety of lenses, but wasn’t sure what I’d want to take today. I normally take the Samyang 45 1.8 when I’m in that mood, but knew I’d want something a little longer. I very rarely want to take a zoom when I’m shooting something akin to street, but ended up settling on Tamron’s 28-75 which fit the day perfectly. Usually we walk around Main and over towards the Quad, but decided today was a good day to take a stroll around Sunset Lake and Graduation Hill. I was hoping to find sledding, but for the most part we just found a few sled trails from earlier in the morning. We did spot what I will continue to call a river otter in the creek by Sunset Lake, but I wasn’t quick enough to catch it before it swam down the bank.

I don’t shoot the 28-75 often, mostly because it just feels like such a boring lens. It covers 90% of the focal length you’d want 80% of the time, but normal zooms just feel like they do everything average. Tamron’s 28-75 (not the new G2 version) is optically fine; it’s sharp enough wide open, sharper stopping down, and the bokeh is decent enough. Said another way, it’s a little soft wide open, the bokeh is a little on the busy side, it has a bit more distortion than I’d like, and the vignette can get a little strong. It’s fine at everything it does, it’s just not fun. That said, the convenience of a normal zoom is unparalleled and I knew it’d cover just about everything I’d want for the walk around campus.

After lunch Rebecca had to keep working on coursework for the semester, so I decided to take a trip to the Trevor Zoo. I was lucky enough to show up at zoo animal dinner time, and the snow kept just about everyone else away. As soon as I walked in I looked for the river otters in the creek beside the bridge, and found one of them sledding down the hill in the enclosure just to run back up and do so again. The red pandas are almost always the highlight of any trip to the Trevor Zoo, and watching them munching on their bamboo like our cat munches on our palm tree was what I was hoping for. The vultures were out of their normal area, perching over the owl and bobcat enclosure to make themselves look as ominous as ever. One of the great horned owls was apparently feeling lazy enough to watch a white-throated sparrow peck at their dinner.

I’m a sucker for zoo photography. As a kid I always wanted to go to the zoo more. I lived off of whatever issue of the Zoobooks the library had, and finally living close enough to a zoo to just drive over on a lark is such a great convenience. I expect that to happen a lot over the next year.