No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. It’s the sun, in mid-afternoon. I shot this one while skiing this afternoon in Pippy Park. And hey, I remembered to change the camera to ISO 200!

The neutral-density filter let me use a slower shutter speed and a wider aperture than would otherwise have been possible.

I’ve often wanted to capture that strange darkness that comes in the winter when the sun dips behind a cloud. It’s like an eclipse of sort, that diminishing of the least light into an evening of mid-day. This is a deliberate exaggeration, of course, done by underexposing the image. This is how it came out of the camera. All I did was crop it.

Here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (Longitude = 52° 43.8′ West, Latitude = 47° 34.2′ North), we get only9.4 hours of daylight (10.5 if you count dusk and predawn). This is a rough time of year if you have a solar dependency. Troglodytes enjoy it, I suppose, but even trolls require the services of the sun, if they don’t like the thing itself.

Sunset now is at 4:57pm. Sunrise is at 7:32. We get up in the dusk and get home in the dusk. We run in the dark, unless we can sneak a day-time session in.

Weekends in the sun are even more important at this time of year.

If you’re wondering what sunrise and sunset times are in various spots in Canada at different times of the year, the National Research Council has a neat little page that will tell you.