Another week of non-dramatic "life carrying on" in my part of the world. I eventually was able to get my car off my property (didn't dare attempt it from Sunday noon until Tuesday afternoon due to the large amounts of snow dumped in the weekend storm of last week) without incident and could carry on with my daily activities. Driving is still a bit questionable on the side streets (including the one immediately outside my door), but if you can make it to the main thoroughfares, you can get where you need to go. I've started carrying a snow shovel in the car just in case, something I likely should have been doing in any event. Nothing like a good weather crisis to make us start behaving in a sensible fashion. While I was trapped in my house I took the opportunity to deal with a few ongoing concerns, including dealing with my broken monopod. It broke on the second time it was used, and I tried the glue fix suggested by my camera store contact, but it broke again during the blizzard shoot at the ice rink. It came to me (as I was researching glue options) that I had actually never run this problem by the manufacturers, and that perhaps that would be a good course of action. I have to say they were very satisfactory to deal with. I emailed my complaint to the faceless "fill in the blanks with your problem" standard form on their website in the evening. By the next morning I had received replies from two different people, climbing the accountability ladder as they went.
Once I detailed my problem (complete with photos to show it exactly), I got the hoped-for answer that this was a manufacturing defect of this monopod and that I should send it and proof of purchase to them and I would receive a new one in the mail. I have done that and look forward to getting my new monopod in due course. I have no particular complaints about the initial failure. In this imperfect world, things will occasionally go wrong. What I can't tolerate nearly so well is when the manufacturer/responsible party neither accepts ownership of the breakdown nor offers a satisfactory solution. Luckily for me, I was dealing with a company that offers excellent customer service and support, so all in all I am happy with how this has been resolved. Another thing that came out of this was my sudden recollection of a very good website for those occasions when gluing *is* the appropriate solution. It is This to That and well worth a look if you want to know the right glue for any adhesive situation. Comprehensive and user friendly. Can't ask for better than that.
I'm still not doing a lot of photos these days due to the weather, but have managed to cobble a few together for today's post. Shot one hearkens back to the indoor chute jumping event of a few weeks back. This was my first effort with the new camera for this style of shot, and I'm quite happy with the end result. These are the most challenging conditions I face in the course of a year, due to poor light, fast and sometimes erratically-moving young horses, and the technical limitations of indoor flash photos, so getting this quality in a "first shoot with this camera" gives me quite a bit of encouragement. I actually almost enjoyed the process this time, instead of heading in to it with the customary combination of performance anxiety and dread. That's got to count as progress!
I enjoy night visuals, and got shot number two last week of the full moon rising in the east through a cloud bank. So far I have been limited to shots of this sort that I can get by hand-holding my camera, but when it's a little less cold I would like to work with using the tripod and figuring out the optimal settings for this sort of shot.
Shot three shows some of the nicely sculpted snowbanks on the south side of the tree-break at Ebon. I'll need to dig out my snowshoes to get closer to these some day soon.
Shot four shows the scene facing west along my street. The centre of the road is a deeply rutted ice chute that is quite difficult to navigate. If you inadvertently go too fast (more than about 20 km/15 mph) you can spin out on the ice and get thrown to the side of the street. It feels like the rut has grabbed the wheels and given the car a good fling, and comes out of nowhere. After a very nasty experience of this sort in a previous year ( I still have no idea why I didn't hit the parked car I was being thrown at), I now proceed with extreme caution in this sort of "goat track". You can see towards the top of this picture that the next block has had snowplows clear each lane with the snow piled in the middle for eventual removal. No such luck on my block!
I got shot five yesterday on the way home from the barn. This is the part of the young warmblood herd that lives down the hill from Ebon. They were milling about a little closer to the road than is usual, so were within range for my big lens. I found out the hard way that the snow in the ditches is a lot deeper than I expected. As I tried to get closer to the horses by traversing the ditch, I went from being in only a few inches of snow to being most of the way to my hips in a drift. I got my shots as the snow filled my boots, then slowly and awkwardly extracted myself as best I could and struggled back to my car. Guess it really is time to pack the snowshoes in the car.
