“The freeze is on, winter has us firmly in its grip, and the world is transformed from liquid to solid, seemingly overnight. The horizon is filled with ice and illusions” – Ed Lehming

The title for the scene seemed fairly obvious to me, looking across Lake Ontario, particularly, Athol Bay in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. This bay is bounded by Lakeshore Lodge Point to the north and Salmon Point to the south. It’s a large almost square bay that is responsible for the formation of Outlet Beach to the east, a very popular destination for summer beach goers. The winter, is a different story.

The lake in front of me had been transformed from what had only been a few weeks before open water with ducks swimming and had now became a vast frozen sea of sheer ice, with a few patches of open water; the frozen landscape punctuated by large masses of floating ice and snow that had broken free from shore during a recent storm.

What really stood out for me was the brilliant blues of the fresh ice. Clearly visible because of the lack of significant snow. I suspect that the snow which had fallen last weeks had combined with pieces of fractured lake ice to form a frozen conglomerate that formed these large frozen rafts, now trapped in ice.

I spent about an hour walking along the shore mesmerized by the scene in front of me. It felt like it was somewhere in the Arctic and not in my South-East Ontario neighbourhood. Since moving here, I’ve begun to make the shift from wooded trails to endless shorelines and water, and I’m learning about all the new features that the lake presents. This scene took me by surprise. I was expecting ice, but I wasn’t expecting these large rafts of snow and ice floating as far as the horizon. And then, there is the optical illusion of the pieces seemingly floating high above the water. It just looks well, odd. Given the distance, I suspect they are larger than the pieces in the foreground. The whole thing reminded me of the D-Day flotillas of boats approaching the shores for France.

To get this shot, I stood on shore and zoomed fully to 300 mm to crop past the vast shelf of sheet ice that filled the east end of the bay. This is a long way out!

Nikon D800
Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G I AF-S VR Zoom @ 300 mm
1/250 sec, f29, ISO 400