Looking down at a frozen Lake Erie

As a significant part of the U.S. continues to be hammered by snow and cold, many of us don’t think about ice covering the Great Lakes and connecting rivers.  It does happen.

This hasn’t been a good year for the lakes or the lake boats.  You can check out Boatnerd.com if you’re curious about what’s been happening on the North Coast.

In early April of 2014, I flew from New York’s La Guardia airport to O’Hare in Chicago, and had a window seat.

As we were nearing Buffalo, NY, the pilot made an announcement about much of Lake Erie being frozen over, and that we could see it from the right side of the plane.  As luck would have it, I was on the “right” side for a change!

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What you’re seeing in this phone photo is Lake Erie in the foreground, and Lake Ontario in the background.  All that gray/white stuff in the center/left-center is in fact ice on Lake Erie!  You’ll see a squiggly gray line that splits in two and then rejoins itself toward the top right – that’s the Niagara River leading toward Niagara Falls.  Fort Erie and the Niagara Region of southeastern Ontario to the left of that, Buffalo NY and its’ suburbs and surroundings are to the right and in the lower foreground.  And, that’s dirt on the window in the very foreground as the sun sets to the west…

Something different to share and talk about is always nice. This is certainly different, and something that most of us have probably never thought about or heard about.

This image will never make it to the galleries on Laughing Frog Images – I know that.

But, sometimes a picture, regardless of the technical and aesthetic quality, is well worth sharing because of the thoughts, wonderings, and conversations it brings about.  This is one of those times.

Thanks for visiting.

Sunrise Done Different

Most of the time you see a picture of a sunrise, the photographer is looking at the sun…

Always having to be different, the Frog presents an alternative way to capture a sunrise.  Look the other way!

While on vacation in Hawaii (before you East Coast folks start, it’s closer to me than Boston is right now…) on the island of Kauai, I awoke to a very bright day (which is easy to do when you’ve traveled west).

I looked to the east, and the sun was hidden by a cloud layer.  No shot there…

But, as I looked to the west, well, here’s what I saw:

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The mountains were in shadow, the clouds were lit by the sun, there was a faint rainbow, and the moon was still out!

Being 2015 and all, I did what most anyone would do – I grabbed my phone to take a picture!  I would have grabbed my camera, but the phone was closer and the rainbow was changing (for the worse) before my eyes as the sun rose behind me.

This image is straight from the camera’s raw file (Nokia Lumia Icon), and was cropped to a square image and converted to a jpg for posting and sharing.

I tried to play with it a bit in an editing program to bring out the rainbow, but as every action has a reaction, and the reactions were not favorable, I decided against that train of thought.

You can find the image here on Laughing Frog Images.

Thanks for looking!