Plum in the Sun

The day started grey and rainy. Around noon, Facebook friends who live a little to the west of here said that it was snowing. Rubbish, I thought: but, looking out of the window ten minutes later, there, indeed, were snowflakes. The snow soon turned to (cold) rain again. Going out for the Sunday newspaper was a wet and chilly experience!

However, in the late afternoon, the clouds started to dissipate, and the sun came out.

I was able to make a quick photograph of this plum tree, beautiful in bloom, that stands just outside our house. The sun had almost sunk to the horizon, so this was the last opportunity of the day to capture the delicate sunlit colours.

The time was 17:25. How wonderful! Twenty minutes later, as I write this, there is no sun, but it's quite light, and the sky is almost cloudless. It doesn't seem so long ago that we were rejoicing in there being signs of daylight after 16:00.

The wind was blowing the blossom about, but I pushed the 'film' speed up a bit (ISO 400) to get an exposure that the EXIF file says is 1/620" and that has more-or-less frozen the motion.