This season's last day of skiing

My brother and friends "out west" were pretty jeoleous of the ski conditions "back east" this winter.  It was a combination of a low snow fall in the west and a bountiful snow fall in the east.

Yesterday was the last day for many New England ski areas.  I skied Cannon Mountain, a New Hampshire owned and run ski area with a storied history.  It's a rugged mountain in winter, known for its wind and ice.  But when the snow is good, there's nothing better than a day at Cannon.

As an avid skier it seemed crazy that Cannon was closing.  There is just so much snow.  Sure, there were bare spots.  But they were few and far between.  The icing on the cake yesterday morning was a touch of overnight snow on the upper mountain.  As cold as some of these pictures look, the temperature pretty quickly moved into the 50s and near 60 about 2 p.m.  The April lift ticket pricing of 2-for-1 was a nice bonus.

These were taken with a Panasonic TS-3 weather resistant point and shoot camera.

Cannon Mountain: winter is still in full swing

While the melting has begun in southern New England, yesterday gave us winter ski conditions at Cannon Mountain in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire.  After a luscious 8" snowfall Sunday and Sunday night, with a colleague from work, we drove up for a fine day of skiing at Cannon, one of New England's oldest ski areas. These snapshots were taken with a little Panasonic point and shoot camera.

Depending on your screen size, larger versions of these images and a few more (20 total) can be seen on my Web site at http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p901834333

View of Mt. Lafayette from Cannon Mountain.

Canon S90 goes with me skiing at Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire

This was my first outing in the cold with the pocketable Canon S90, arguably the best (matter of opinion of course) compact camera currently available.  A compact camera in my opinion must be sleek enough to not only fit in the front pocket of a pair of jeans, but also slide easily into that pocket.  To do this it must have a retractable lens.  It also has to be light enough to be barely noticeable.  A camera of under 7 ounces will do the trick.

In spite of the sun on this day, the base temperature at the mountain was about 15F. We saw no thermometers at the top of the mountain, and maybe this was a good thing. 

I kept the camera in an outside pocket of my jacket so that it would be cool enough not to fog up when using, yet warm enough not to freeze.  To be honest, any compact could probably have done as well with the images.  With such bright sun I was able to shoot at ISO 80, and ISO where small-sensored cameras will do just fine when the sun is behind your back.

Basically I shot large, high quality JPEGs in "P" mode, which is a mode that allows the camera to pick both the shutter speed and aperature.  I used Auto White Balance, and Auto ISO (though there was enough light so the camera always chose ISO 80). After each shot I confirmed my exposure with the histogram, then used the camera's unique front dial to make any EV compensation adjustments should I feel a follow-up shot was necessary to get the exposure right.  This was the best I could do, because with such bright light it was next to impossible to see the LCD in spite of its 3" viewing area with 461,000 dots. 

The auto white balance resulted in a bit too much blue, so I added some amber in post-processing with Lightroom.  But snow does funky things with white balance and exposure.  Next time I might try the snow scene mode and see how that does.  The snow scene mode adds a bit more exposure,which is important in snow scenes to compensate for the light meters tendency to reduce white snow to medium grey tones.  The scene mode also helps with the white  balance problems created by snow.

Other than that, I cropped most of these in Lightroom as it was very hard in the bright light to properly compose the pictures in-camera, especially since I was wearing polarized ski goggles!  That's Mt. Lafayette in the background in the 1st, 3rd and 5th images.

I have 19 pictures posted on the Web site, which can be accessed with this link:

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/cannon02042010