This past winter hasn’t been a glorious one as far as photography goes in our area. Barely any snow, or ice, or fog, it has been about as plain as you can get.

But it wasn’t all for naught! First, we’ve been getting some fantastic weather of late, very unusual for the season. Mostly, though, the river has been providing a great subject of late with some interesting thaw patterns. In fact I have spent a few days over the past couple of weeks studying a little area a few minutes away from my house, and all I can say is that it’s been a blast.

These two shots were taken on two separate days using a combination of techniques. Both were shot way past sunset as dusk provided some fantastic colour reflecting on the water. For the image below, I got as low as I possibly could to catch as much of the reflecting light. I used a polariser to further strengthen the reflection, then I zoomed out to 300mm at f/22. Even with the small aperture I couldn’t get as much depth of field as I needed so I basically took two images, one focused for the front of the image and one for the back. The two images were then blended manually in photoshop to give the result below.

For the second image, the process was essentially the same but with a slight modification. As I returned to the scene a few days after the first image was taken, there were even more “pots” on the ice than before. Since I wanted to capture as many of them as possible, but still make them an important part of the image, I decided to make a panorama. The final result below is combination of multiple horizontal shots. Each horizontal shot is a blend of two images to maximise depth of field. The resulting blends were then stitched together using photoshop’s photomerge function. I can’t quite remember the total number of shots, but all I can say is that the image below is a crop from an image that would print at 60×10 ” at its native resolution (34mp).