Everything Looks Different at Night - Day 21

Willow Pollen     

Pussywillow Buds Sprout Into Pollen     

- creating strange new flowers.    

Not-quite dark and not-quite a silhouette, these willow buds stand out against a dusky sky.       

Everything Looks Different at Night - Day 20

Sunset Clouds     

Sunset Over the River    

- and the clouds and the distant shore are disappearing into the darkness.    

Sunset can be a disorienting time of day, when the familiar shapes of distant hills become a dark mass and when clouds loom low and heavy with shadows. Sunset forces us to pay attention in different ways than we do in full daylight.       

Birches and their Neighbors - Day 21

Solstice Sunset

Solstice Sunset  

- a golden winter glow on the shortest day of the year

It's the shortest day of the year, the angle of the sun is low in the sky, the air is crisp and cold and the sunset light is pure molten gold through the trees.
Solstice - it means "the sun stands still" - is the point at which, to a viewer on earth, the sun appears to change the direction of its movement in the sky. Many people around the world celebrate the winter Solstice as the time when the light comes back.
From here on the days get longer, and as the sun tilts higher and higher in the sky, the winter season changes to spring, and when the sun hits its highest point in mid-June, it's summer. And the solar cycle continues through autumn and back to winter again.

Birches and their Neighbors - Day 7

Birches on the Riverbank

Riverbank Birches at Sunset  

- with a thin sliver of moon

Sunsets on the river are worth seeing. Depending on the weather, the sunset can range from brilliant reds, pinks and oranges in the clouds, to a lone pale disc dropping into an overcast void. Depending on the season, the river can be a reflecting mirror, or a flat white field of snow and ice, with fringes of birch and alder on the riverbank. And depending on its cycle, the moon shows as a pretty-shaped decoration hanging over the scene. It's transient, though, a sunset is. So it's really worth taking a few minutes to look at it.

Crosspost: Labrador Landscape

This is a crosspost of a 5" x 7" watercolor painting from my blog of "Labrador Landscapes."

You can check out this link and see more of this work:

http://labradorlandscape.wordpress.com/

Every day a new image for the month of February.