Another shot from the same day (as the last pic of the day). It was a warm December day and a fresh snowfall was melting and re-freezing into ice on the Tamarack trees (Larix Laricina).

The background is a completely natural artifact of having a large telephoto lens, leaving the aperture as open as possible, and having a fairly low quality lens. The telephoto focal length along with the wide open aperture (f5.6 in this case) made the background completely blurred out. The bright highlights become circles. If I had a much nicer lens, they might be softer-edged and not as distracting. I kind of like the way they turned out though. I suspect the little specks in them mean I had a lot of dust on the end of my lens.