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jimsjournal

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? -- 01/05/11


This is my 16th entry in my 5th year of taking part in Holidailies. If you have wandered in from Holidailies, you can scroll down to read a brief introduction.

As noted up there between the Holidailies 2010 logos, this is my 16th entry for this run of Holidailies -- and the final entry for this season. That's 16 out of 30 possible entries, so at least I managed to do slightly better than fifty-fifty.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? is a line from a poem by François Villon (mid-fifteenth century French poet -- a favorite of mine, although I can only read him in translation) -- roughly translating as "But where are the snows of yesteryear?" That line popped into to my head early on Sunday morning when I looked outside at the snow remaining from our post-Christmas blizzard and the mist that filled the air. I just had to go out and take these pictures about fifteen or twenty minutes before dawn.

Above: standing in the street in front of my house, a few minutes before 7 a.m., facing what I think of as "up" the street (which, technically is "up" because there is a very slight incline but nothing that would ever make you think of it as a hill or, actually, even notice). It is roughly northwest.

Below: turned 180 degrees, now looking "down" the street in a southeasterly direction. (That's our mail box.)

I loved the softness of the morning fog. I used Photoshop to reduce them to 600 pixel width at medium quality but did not use any filters nor make any color or balance adjustments. I did play with doing an auto adjust on the color -- which turned it into an almost pure black and white image except for a touch of red on the mailbox flag. I liked both of them with that black & white look, but I decided that I preferred to keep the original look with the cold hint of blue.

Once upon a time -- ah yes, in those days of yesteryear -- I used to fool around with photography, especially black and white. Oh, yeah, I went through many rolls of TRI-X back in those days. I would have totally flipped at the thought of the almost infinite number of pictures we can take now with our digital cameras

Anyway, technically, I can say that these are pictures of the snows of yesteryear since I took the pictures in 2011 of snow that fell in 2010, right?

And I had the thought of gathering some old pictures with snow settings and doing a snow photo theme entry -- les neiges d'antan -- but I simply do not have the time today to hunt down the various pictures (and, in most cases, have to scan them, etc.) so I will simply insert a snowfall photograph of yours truly, taken when I was about eleven months old (which regular readers may recognize as one I posted in an entry this past July).




A brief introduction.... (edited to update it from 2006)
A brief introduction for anyone who wanders in here from the Holidailies site -- I'm a middle-aged (*cough* okay, 63 67 , but I don't look a day over 62 66 ) guy who lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian ("Jill" -- 24 28 yr old college student and baker), son Jeremy (21 25 yr old college student restaurant manager), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandson s Sam and Milo . I'm a former programmer/systems analyst who got into doing software training and currently works from home doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-based training courses. I've been writing this online journal since 1996.



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