First Ice of the Season

It was pretty late last night when I received a call to go shoot some ice in the morning, and I wasn't sure I was going, but I did set my alarm for 5:30am. When the alarm went off I decided to head out. I met Annette and Don on the river road in Susquehanna State Park. We headed down to the usual ice site, and was happy to see the water was down and there were a few pools of ice. I made 19 shots there before the water in the river started rising rapidly and chased us away. So we headed to Deer Creek and found some nice ice around the little tributaries. We worked until 10:30 when we were all hungry and cold. I processed some images while watching the Ravens game. The opening image shown here is a mirror image and then mirrored again.  The next two images were shot on the banks of the Susquehanna River, where the skim ice forms such beautiful patterns and freezes over the river rocks like fried eggs. Sometimes looking at the ice patterns is like looking at clouds for images and one sees familiar shapes like in the Battling Dragons image where one might see a dragon defending his den, and then there are the classic frozen leaves. It was a fun morning and I am looking forward to going back after the holidays. All the images here were shot with a 200mm macro lens.