Frozen Precipitation Covers Major Southern City

Hey! It's snowing!


It's 44 degrees F (7 degrees C) and snowing in Houston, Texas. It can be hard to show the fine ice particles against the sky or a distant background, so I videotaped the pellets hitting our grill cover.

Bright Red Branches Creates Winter Interest

Here is another December 2008 calendar for your computer desktop. Click on the photo to see a full-size version. It looks very nice with the Windows Classic desktop theme "Brick."

The branches are actually that beautiful bright red. The original photo was taken in early March 2007, so the scene was more autumnal in color. I was creating a winter scene, so I took out the dried grasses and added a white background. I think the snow-covered effect is nice. You may recognize the turkey tracks from the first December 2008 calendar. It makes a good background for the calendar.


This wallpaper is for personal use only. Please do not remove the copyright notice.

Mystery Turkey Tracks Snow onto Website

Here is the new desktop calendar for December 2008. I incorporated three personal photos into this image.

The first is the calendar background. It is a early spring 2007 photo of Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills, South Dakota. If you look closely, you can see there still was quite a bit of snow on the ground!

The second is the main background image. I took a photo of turkey tracks December 2007, also in the Black Hills.

The third photo is the red star. It is the tree topper on my parents' Christmas tree. It is not the tree topper we had when I was growing up. As a child, our tree topper was a finial style, similar in shape to the first photo on this webpage, except the point didn't twist and we didn't have people or snowmen.

I used two text treatments. First, on "Winter Wonderland," I removed the fill color and using an inner shadow and outer glow, simulating a depression in the snow, like the turkey tracks. It isn't exact because I had already treated the text with some rough shading and erasing. Second, on "December 2008," I also removed the fill, and added a stroke around the letters. It felt too crisp, and I wanted to have a hand-stamped effect, so I added a very slight motion blur.

If you would like to use this wallpaper on your computer, you may do so. Click on the photo to open a full-size version. This wallpaper is for personal use only. Please do not remove the copyright notice.