Note: These photos were originally posted on Facebook on December 19, 2014. I thought that it would make a nice follow-up post to the Silvery Night post I made 10 days ago on December 9, 2018 under very similar conditions.

___________________________________________________________________________

It’s a rare night of heavy dew and light frost here in the western Arizona desert. The leaves of all my nursery plants are covered in tiny moisture droplets, which lends some of them a silvery effect as light from my headlamp refracts through them. Plants that have a waxy, blue coating on the leaves show this silvery reflection most clearly, such as many agaves, yuccas, and aloes. Juniper berries are also showing it, and they sparkle like little sapphires in the night sky underneath a canopy of brilliant stars. You can hardly tell where the juniper tree ends and the stars begin. It’s magically lovely!

Orion sets over my little paper house on a cold but beautiful winter night. The winter solstice is in only two more days, and a red-eye night flight from an airplane traces the sky as well, carrying people to and from who knows….

The photo was created in a 60 second exposure, the maximum my camera allows. First I set the camera open on a tripod, then I walk through the scene with my LED headlamp which produces white light that is fairly true to full-color spectrum sunlight. I briefly illuminate the things I want to have show up by sweeping the light across them. The zigzag pattern on the soil is created by me walking through the scene swinging my light back and forth as I walk forwards. At the end, I went inside the house and turned on the inside room light for a few seconds. I made about 10 attempts at this photo before I got all the elements correct to my satisfaction. The other photos were good too, but I liked this one the best because after the previous 9 efforts I had learned how to adjust my timing most accurately.

An earlier effort at the same scene.

Above is an earlier iteration of the photo session. It is just about as equally nice an image as the first one, but I liked the presence of the airplane trail of flashing lights and the larger number of zigzags in the other photo just a bit better. I also think the illumination is more even and the juniper berries stand out better in the other photo, so it edges this one out slightly.

A thin veneer of tiny water droplets covers everything as a heavy dew falls across the desert. The sparkling silver effect is most pronounced on the waxy blue juniper berries (Juniperus californica) and the swordlike leaves of the banana yuccas (Yucca baccata) in this photo. The cactus is a totem pole (Lophocereus schottii var monstrosus).

The reflective sparkling effect is a bit more difficult to catch on camera than it is to see with the naked eye, but this does a decent job. The effect is most pronounced at a distance of 20-50 feet, where the dark green juniper foliage isn’t well-lit by a beam of light, but the bright pinpoints of dewy berries stands out like reflective eyes on animals. Normally juniper berries aren’t that reflective – it’s really the micro-layer of water droplets that gives this sparkly effect. And since dew is so rare here we almost never get to see it. This is the first time I’ve photographed it since my older camera didn’t have the capabilities this one does. 

_______________________________________________________________

And also from the FB archives, another sparkly-things post from December 19, 2015, three years ago. The “Memories” feature at FB is great – it allows you to reblog content that was originally only seen by whoever amongst your friends before it got buried. At least these web-based blog posts can be found at any time via search engines. 

Here are some close ups of the red amaryllis (Hippeastrum hybrids) I have blooming right now. The petals have a sparkling quality evident in full sunlight, probably caused by light refracting through the curvature of special cells. It’s a hard effect to capture accurately, but I think I did acceptably well in a couple of these shots. Oh, and the moon, too.

Detail of the glistening cells in the petals of the amaryllis, most visible in strong direct sunlight and much less so under most artificial light sources.

I am glad that at least once a year we can recover items from the Ghosts of Facebook Past and resurrect them!