Ice Flow

Winter Photography / Digital Photo / Fred First / Southwest Virginia
I’m thinking maybe this will be a good day for some creek ice pictures. At least that possibility sweetens the knowledge that I have to taxi some packages down our luge-run road and up and over to the Check Post Office later this morning. I’ll carry the tripod and camera bag with me, just in case.

Here’s one I grabbed the other day, and was especially happy about, seeing it “developed” later, inside on the computer monitor. What excited me was the fact that it was taken hand held at 1/15th of a second and is a sharp as I could want. I set shutter priority at that speed hoping to get some motion blur in the water (1/4th a second would have been better in that regard) while possibly not losing too much quality to camera shake. The 18-200mm Nikon VR lens seems to have done its work!

This shot, full res, makes a dandy desktop picture! Tell you what, if you’d like to use it, click this link to open the file (800k) and right click to “save as desktop image”. At least that should work in Windows. Let me know if it looks okay on your monitor, and if not, in future I can tweak resolution and aspect ratio, maybe, to improve things. (This is a limited time file; I’ll probably remove it from the server in a few days.)

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Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. That image stabilization stuff is really nice stuff. I find myself not toting the tripod more and more, using trees and rocks to brace and letting IS do it’s thing. Still in really low light or very slow shutter speeds the tripod is a necessity for sharp pics. Glad to see you’re enjoying the new toys.

  2. thanks for the desktop Fred! very nice indeed. I made your house a “desktop for a day” here at work. hugs from PA – connie

  3. This image is spectacular, Fred. Icy streams and the icicles suspended over them are some of my favorite photo ops ever – although I still have to do a fair bit of work on capturing them well.