More Ice, But Cracked This Time!

This will probably be the last ice shot, but I loved how strange this all looked, with the large cracks and the strange rocks sticking up and more darker gray ice in the background.  Took this yesterday.  I kept photographing the ice because it seems historic, and, truth be told, it is so much easier to find more interesting photographs of the ice, than when all the water comes back, so I am trying to make the most of things.

 

How Many Pictures of Ice Can You Shoot, Anyway?

I was finally able to start taking my walks again because the temperature was 40 degrees and there were only light winds.  But it was an overcast day so the light was not interesting at all.  I brought my camera with me but had no hopes of finding anything.  Boy was I surprised!  The harbor ice is breaking up with the warmer temps an as the tide rises and falls, it makes fractures in the ice and those patterns are amazing.  But I found this so interesting so I am posting it first.  The ice has been fractured in several different ways and the shapes and tones, light and dark are really interesting in an abstract way.  As I was composing this two Mallard ducks came out of the water up on to the ice and started wandering around and they were in the perfect place when I shot this frame!  So the answer to the question posed in the title is: "I can take a lot more photographs than you or I could imagine!"

 

A Lifesaver!

This gas fireplace is a lifesaver in this bitter cold.  Our new back room is really well insulated.  It has two radiators in it, a full size Sunrad in the big room and a small half-sized radiator in the bathroom.  That generally keeps the back room warm if the outside temps are maybe down to 32 degrees, but below those temperatures the back room, which we keep at 70 is down around 64 degrees.  So when we need to use the back room, we just turn on this amazing fireplace for a while and then the room is as warm as toast.  It is amazing how realistic this looks when burning.  And you can turn it on with one press of a button with the remote, and one click turns the fire off!  Like I said, a real lifesaver!

 

My Frozen Harbor Obsession

I parked my car on the way back from some errands today and walked to the boat launch ramp, to see how the ice was doing.  it was fun to see the slabs of ice piled up on the end of the ramp like this.  It easily shows how thick the ice was. Part of me wonders if the ice was strong enough to walk out on, if just a small way, but I wasn't stupid enough to try.  The thing is, with the tide rising and falling each day, if you looked closely, there were fractures visible all over the top of the ice.  That alone was enough to keep me from seeing if I could walk out just a "little" way.

This is a view to the right off the boat ramp, which shows how the ice was broken into blocks because of the tidal action.  And then you can see other broken ice off in the distance.  I also went up to the park that overlooks the sound and I could see that large areas of water are now visible now that the temperatures are not sub-zero.  I hope you will humor me with my obsession of the ice photos, but to me this is historic, given that we haven't had a freeze like this since 1977, which turns out to be 49 years ago!  Yikes!  I would have been only 35 years old at that time!

 

Carefully Spaced

Here's the good news - this is not a photograph of ice or snow!  I saw these gulls all lined up on the rusty railing of a structure that is used for the volunteer firemen's competitions, in the parking lot of where we have our Tuesday coffee.  I desperately needed something different for the blog.  I like that it is all rusty angles of pipe and carefully arranged birds.

 

Back In The Old Days

Back in the old days, in this case 1977, there were no such things as drones.  So when we had a long spell of bitter cold weather, I suggested that I go flying an see if I could find some interesting photographs of frozen harbors.  This was up in Oyster bay.  I would just fly around at 1000 feet and look all around until I found something interesting.  This is a meandering creek that has frozen over.  I love that it looks like a dragon.  I stumbled across this 35mm color slide by accident the other day, and so made a digital copy of it and here it is for you to see. This was one of a number of aerial photographs I did that ran in four issues of the Newsday Sunday Magazine, called "The Seasons From The Air."

 

After Dinner at McDonalds

We couldn't decide what to make for dinner tonight.  We were stuck.  So I said "Do you want to go to McDonalds for dinner?"  Kathy lit up and said "Yes!"  No cooking and no dishes to clean tonight!  We didn't eat too much bad stuff...  One small hamburger each and we split one medium order of fries, and a medium diet coke.  It actually tasted good!  As we were finishing up, I looked over at a nearby table and saw this.  Gimmie a break!  You mean to tell me that if you have something to eat here, you can't carry the tray over to the waste bin before you leave?  I do think that this is an interesting photograph, artistically.  I love that the yellow seats match the yellow paper on the tray.  And the objects are arranged in such an interesting way.  I love this photograph!  AND...   The photograph doesn't have any ice in it!