Eighth Day of Christmas: New Years Day and Drip, Drip Yippie!!!

Hate, hate, HATE taking down the tree on New Years Day.
It went up early in December and was pretty dry, but the real reason it taken to the curb was to make sure our crawling grandson wouldn't be grazing on fallen needles when he comes by to visit.
What a mess it was; not just needles but tinsel was strewn around too.
A real chore to handle when all I really wanted to do was sit and still enjoy hot  mulled cider and Christmas music by the tree.
I've decided I really like having a tree in that space and now I will be on the hunt for a nice ficus or something to set in the Christmas tree space.

No snow was supposed to fall; it fell anyway and I got one fairly good photo.

The snow fell off and on all day.
By sunset the icicles were glowing golden like the winter sky.

 

 

 

(I remember the first time I saw icicles in Salt Lake at Christmas time. We were going through a drive to pick up some Mexican food.  I thought to myself what an amazing job they had done decorating the building with such pretty fake icicles.  About five minutes later it dawned on me that the icicles were real.  Oh yeah, such a dumb blond So Cal girl moment!)

 

Every house and most churches are sporting icicles.
Some houses have icicles that reach from the eaves to the ground.
They are so pretty...I just try to forget that icicles are not good on house gutters and roof lines.

I spent some time trying to figure out the rented 100mm macro lens before I have to return it.
I finally did a google search on macro photography.
 It was suggest to use AV setting and to crank f stop down to 30.
(I never mess with f stops....)
It did the trick to set the auto focus on just one thing and worked better for me than other settings.
Since the outdoor temps have fallen into the below 20s, I "practiced" my macro focus skills on soap suds.

 

 

The print from a placemat below the bowl of suds peeked through.

The suds are about a quarter inch in size.
What I am not getting is why the focus is focusing in a band now.
Looks like I still have some research and studying up to do on macro settings.

Now I had seen photos of drips taken with 100 mm lens so I decided to try my hand at it too. 

Caught the falling drip finally after I figured out to sycronize my shutter click with a count to match the drip fall.

Next I emptied the suds and refilled the glass pie pan with regular water, focused closely on the dripping and about a hundred shots later got some good photos!

 

 

 

 

 

I really like this shot...

And this one...

And this one...

This one is so interesting to me; the drop hadn't penetrated the water surface yet.

 

 

My New Year resolution probably should be to "Get. A. Life." instead of spending hours goofing off with my camera.
I soothed my guilty conscious by reminding myself that most of America sat on couches groaning and yelling about the goings on of twelve grown men who were attempting to move a football through another group of twelve men.
Compared to that injury producing activity, taking photos of water drops sounds down right virtuous to me!
I will settle down tomorrow and get on track again.
Or maybe not...
Four more days of Christmas still to go for me!