A long look at the lake

I may as well post this one now. It'll be summer before I finish working on it to my complete satisfaction. (Frustrated perfectionist, that's me!) Anyway, I have no idea what Blogger is going to do to this one, or how much you'll be able to see, but it's worth clicking on the picture to open this one up bigger.

A long view of the lake.

This is a severely downsized version; the original is something like 150MB, and, if printed, would be 10 inches high and about 13 feet long. It's made up of 26 shots. (If you want to see a larger version than what's here, email me.)

A few weeks ago, May was clamoring for a chance to go out walking on the lake, and May, being May, didn't want to go do it alone. So Paul and I went out with her. We walked down our street, to the edge of the island, and, well, kept on walking. The snow was about four or five inches deep on the surface, so Paul and May spent a few minutes kicking aside the white powder so that they could actually stand on the ice itself.

Paul and May, on ice.

While was trying out the panorama/stitch feature on my camera (Click, turn, click, turn, click... I did two of these, and you can see the sun is lower at the end of the sequence than it was at the beginning!) Paul and May got quite a ways out — that's them in the first picture, about two-thirds of the way over.

After I was done, I jogged to catch up with the other two, who were chatting with the only other people out on the lake that evening. It turned out to be a father and son, out spending some time together in the cold. None of us had really had any contact with anyone that did ice fishing, so we stayed and chatted a while. It's a fairly complicated activity, to hear them tell it; I would have thought the fishing would be the easy part, and the main attraction would have been the quiet time out on the ice, away from all the noise of everyday life. Apparently that's a side benefit. (It might expalin why I've never caught much of anything when I've gone fishing, too.)

On the way back in, I noticed that the cheery glow coming from the houses wasn't the result of artificial lighting. It was a reflection of the natural glory of the setting sun.

"Picture window" takes on a whole new meaning.