343/365: "I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before." ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

2 more pictures in notes above ! :)

Today marks the coldest day that I've ever experienced in a place where I live: 7°F degrees!!! That is so incredibly cold it's hard for me to understand...so I went outside because I needed to fill the bird feeders and in so doing, I had to lift the feeder off the metal pole...and I held the pole for just about 5 seconds. After about two seconds it felt like I was touching a hot iron!! WOW!! We have two bird feeders, so I used one hand for each pole, and then I shook my tail back into the house, yike-yiking all the way to the hot water to warm my freezing hands! :D :D HOLY COW THAT'S COLD!!!

Always the glutton for punishment, I noticed that the frost formations were just AMAZING, so...once my fingers warmed up, I got my camera, put on my boots again, and out I went to capture frost crystals! :D

This one is my favorite because it was a mistake. I was taking a picture of a different area and the flash illuminated this frost flake beautifully, showing how it grew out of the vinyl cover we have on our spa. I didn't realize they can form this way, isn't it fascinating?! (By the way, this is the same surface as the next picture...instead of being medium brown, it's burgundy, which I pushed closer to black to help pop the "frost-flake" out :)

Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 New York City;– March 9, 1989 Boston, Massachusetts) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, and stills of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artworks. Wikipedia: Robert Mapplethorpe