Worth a Second Look 3

I took this photo in April 2016. Droplets on a spiderweb have been photographed by many photographers before me but what I think makes this photo worth a second look are the several ways the delicate web contrasts with the muscular cables.

Autumn

Fog creeps over the western end of the Inner Harbour at Work Point while a vee of migrating geese passes high overhead.

World Wet Web

Fog doesn't just alter the big picture, it has a wonderful effect on the small scale too, though I imagine spiders are not keen it.

Foggy Morning

Regular visitor to this site, Furry Gnome, mentions that the sun never stops shining here. It's true - Victoria does get a lot of sunshine - statistically, about twice as much as Vancouver. However, it does rain from time to time and though it's rare, we even get some foggy days. Above is what the West Bay Walkway looked like when I walked along it on Saturday morning. I'm not keen on rain but I really like fog because it is almost as good as snow for changing the way everything looks.

Gonzales Hill Shrouded

On a recent walk the fog rolled in and created such a eerie mood. - Fern

Fisgard in the Fog 2

Along the shore there are some aspens or poplar trees whose leaves are just turning into coppery disks that shiver in the slightest breeze.

Fisgard in the Fog

Those of you who visit here regularly will know my fondness for the Fisgard Lighthouse. Thus you will understand why I was happy to see it on a foggy morning recently. I have not photographed it in the fog previously so the first thing I did when I arrived at the Fort Rodd Hill/Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site was take some shots of the lighthouse. It was only later I noticed the Steller's Jays and the deer romping around.

Enjoying the View

My walking partners enjoyed the walk on the breakwater as much as I did. - Fern Long

Ogden Point

With a kind of backwards logic I thought it would be interesting to go for a walk last night on the breakwater while it was so foggy. Guess what? We couldn't see much really. The water was absolutely calm and these tugs looked quite cozy tied up for the night. All the same it was lovely to be out surrounded by the sound of the foghorns and the distinctly metallic tang of the fog. - Fern

Thetis Lake

I never, ever tire of this lovely spot. - Fern

In the Mist

These foggy, misty shots continue to interest me - what I like about this one is the diminishing contrast as the eye moves from the foreground to the background and the way the Shoal Point Condominium seems to float or hover in the background.

Misty Morning

Who can resist the magic that happens when the rising sun sparkles through the mist? - Fern

Foggy Empress

Here we are looking into the Inner Harbor with Laurel Point on the right and the Songhees condominiums on the left. Usually this view frames the Fairmont Empress Hotel at the end of Inner Harbor, but with the foggy weather we've been having lately it is quite invisible.

Misty Morning

Foggy Morning

Though we are still in summer, we've had a few foggy mornings lately when a cold mist drifts in over the city from the strait.

On Top of Ole Smoky...

All covered in snow, I lost my true lover, From courtin too slow.

Well, it's not ole Smoky and there's no snow but the song came to mind when I was looking at these photos. This is Mt. Work Park and we had climbed to what we thought might be the peak but it was awfully hard to tell in the fog.

Fogbank

I confess to a fondness for fog so I liked seeing this fogbank moving in from the ocean the other morning. I realize that for mariners it must pose real problems but with both feet safely on the ground and from a distance, it's lovely. A few minutes after taking the above photo (with my "new" 50mm lens) I noticed the MV Coho, the car ferry from Port Angeles, nosing her way out of the fog and took the photo below.

Sunny Fog

The weather continues strange - it's warm and sunny but there is a sharp cool edge to the air not unlike autumn and occasional fogs like this on otherwise clear days.

Beacon Hill Mist

It was mild and foggy today but the fog was light, more of a mist than a fog. This photo is the lower slope of Beacon Hill.

...on little cat feet.

In her comment on yesterday's post, Knoxville Girl dissed Robert Frost so today, in a demonstration of Astral-American poets' solidarity, Carl Sandberg punished me with this bit of weather. Thanks KG. May a thousand grackles nest in your eaves.Readers who were not raised on a diet of American poetry are probably wondering what I'm on about here. An American poet, Robert Frost, wrote a poem about walls, the subject of yesterday's post.

MENDING WALL
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

**************
Carl Sandberg, another American poet, wrote a poem about fog.

FOG
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.