Sunlight

Quick post from the land of no furnace.  Well, the furnace is fine (I hope) but yet another thermostat has tanked (I hope).  Regardless, it's as much fun as you can imagine at MINUS SIX this morning :-o.  Not to worry, the repairman has been called, but while I can put on a warm wool sweater, our water pipes can't.  This normally wouldn't be a big concern in Kentucky...

Since I think we could all probably stand to soak up some sun, here's Betsy in the barn rafters a couple  mornings ago.  I'm sure I could have framed this better, but I still like the shot.  The colors are pretty and the white contrast with the dark loft background provides something a little different. 

I used my "spot" metering setting to take this picture.  That's a simple manual setting that I'm pretty sure every camera has (check your manual or look your camera up online ;-).  What spot metering does is read the light just off her rather than trying to read the light throughout the whole picture.  

Under normal circumstances, our cameras do a pretty good job balancing everything out, but in this situation, with a bright white cat in full sun and a dark shadowed background, with "matrix" metering (the whole picture area), Betsy's white got blown out (glaring white and no detail).  You could see much of the barn rafters in the background, but since I wanted the picture to be of Betsy, I wanted Betsy to look her best. 

I play around with this setting when I'm taking pictures of something going on in the barn, when I'm trying to take a picture of something with the sun not at my back, if it's sunny and I'm trying to take a picture of Hank...  Give it a try sometime :-). 

Speaking of pictures, I posted some early morning shots on Twitter today.  I wish I'd had my big girl camera.  It was a stunningly beautiful morning.  As the sun rose over Stella's hill, it was so cold that our ponds were steaming.  And the steam was sitting in layers over the water and the sunlight turned it pink.  

The horses had frosty noses and eye lashes and even T-Bone's neck hair was frosted.  I've never seen that before.  Hank was still curled into a tiny ball in his straw bed.  He looked up as I brought him some breakfast, but decided he might sleep in a little bit longer.  Maisie was ready to start her day!