Pictures

It's been so cold here - the coldest start to a winter in ten years, apparently - that you could walk on water. If, that is, you were a duck.

I've also been struck by how organised the Dutch are in their attempts to be thrifty. I cycled past a small lumber yard the other day, and it was full of pieces of dead wood that had either fallen off in the wind, or had been sawn off in order to prevent them from falling - were it to get windy - on someone's head. The lumberyard was split into two sections - one for softwood (that could be used to make paper), and another for hard woods. Waste not, want not is clearly the motto around here.

Got a bit of a refresher course in high school physics while taking pictures today. I like taking pictures of little puddles of water with the the sky (or a tree, or a cliff) reflected in them. There's an impish thrill in seeing the sky trapped in a few square inches of water. Or in seeing the bare branches of a tree twisted into strange and unnatural shapes - as if by a hurricane or hallucinogen - as the slightest breeze makes ripples on the surface of the water. 

My point is this: when you take such a picture, you can't focus on the surface of the water. You get a perfectly nice picture of the puddle and everything around it - like in picture above. The picture you are more likely to want, though, is - as every high school student knows - that of a virtual image somewhere "inside" the puddle, and you have to trick your camera into focusing on it. And then you get a picture like this.