Warming tent

My wife is filling in as editor of the Alaska Star and so I've been tapped to provide photos on occasion. I was attending the Eagle River tree-lighting ceremony last Friday, shooting kids with Santa, grumpy reindeer handlers and angelic-voiced kids singing carols. As the evening wound down, the 15 degree F. temperature started getting the better of some of the families so they started migrating toward the warming tent. I saw some interesting silhouettes so I walked over andy pointed my camera at the wall and waited. The shadows waivered, unrecognizable shapes twisted and stretched across the wall, then this father and child walked into the tent and scooted in along the wall. The shadow was just what I had hoped and I shot it with my D300 and a 24 mm zoom. I had to flash it, but kept the power dialed back to about -1.7.

Starting over

I was skiing earlier this evening on the ski trails near my house and wondered if slogging around the same trail system year after year might be a sign of insanity, or dementia at least. The temperature was 20 degrees, just about perfect for skate skiing and I had the trails to myself. I've skied since I was a kid, mostly around the Anchorage bowl and for the last ten years on the Chugiak ski trails just north of Eagle River.
I was skating up a hill when I flashed back to a similar night several years ago when I was cruising the trails with a friend, walking the hills and stopping at the top of each to catch our breaths. Now, a decade older, it seems like I can cover the whole trail system in the time it used to take me to go 10 kilometers. I'm not sure if I'm in better shape or if my expectations have diminished enough to intersect with my athletic ability. I suspect the latter.