snow pictures from yesterday

It snowed yesterday, so I took these pictures.

It's actually harder taking good snow pictures than it seems, because all the white in the frame seems to wash out the three-dimensional feeling in a picture's composition, if it's not handled carefully.

Anyway, I headed out to Bu-am dong, near Sangmyung University, and took some pictures on the way up a couple of mountainsides, and through a couple of grotty old neighborhoods, the likes of which are slowly, sadly disappearing.

Anyway, I love fresh snow.







And snow on branches.








maybe my second favorite picture from the day... I was actually a little disappointed with the results of my photography, though the snowy trudge was sure fun.


There's a little temple up there.


during the spring, this was a rushing river.  Now kids were down there, having snowball fights in the riverbed.




This is a good example of why snow doesn't photograph well in daylight: the textures of the snow, and the branches on which it hung, got washed out by the diffuse daylight.  If the snow had been sitting on larger shapes, the picture would have some composition, and if it were a moving video camera, you could see the 3D movement of the things behind the branches, to get a sense of the depth.  As it is, there isn't much to see in this picture, though it looked super cool in person.


Maybe at night, if there were a single light source (say, an orange street light) it would have looked cooler.

Pine branches sagging under heavy snow.  Now we're talking!



My favorite picture on the day.  I'm pretty sure that's Bukhansan, though I might be wrong.


I also managed to get the pictures off the confounded wrong-file-formatted video camera and onto my computer, finally.



so those are my snow-tos.  (see what I did there?  I combined snow and photo, because they both have a long "o" sound!)

I also spotted this cool coffee shop name on the way up the hill to Sangmyung University:




The most puzzling thing I saw during my walkabout was definitely this nativity scene, out in front of a neighborhood church:

it's a run of the mill nativity scene, until you look at the proportional sizes of the figurines, and you wonder how a Mary that size had a baby Jesus that size... unless Jesus was capable of fish and loaves type miracles right from day one.


And, finally, because I have nowhere else to put them:

One of the little city beauty elements that one doesn't spot every day, but which I always love to see:

When the sun reaches a certain angle, it'll reflect off the side of one glass-windowed building, onto the side of another building, and cast all kinds of strangely shaped lights and shadow on it.


Stuff you don't see in the countryside, friends.