Well, it’s another day of “extreme cold” weather warnings out there, so it’s a good time to sit and post some pictures of another extremely cold day from a week ago. Only on that day I ignored the warnings of bitter cold and drove out to Presqu’ile Provincial Park to catch the sunrise. Seemed like a good idea at the time… sort of… OK, I almost crawled back in bed, but I didn’t!

A week ago today, it was -39 with the windchill on the shores of Lake Ontario, but I was dressed in a few warm layers, so I actually didn’t mind the cold at all. So much so in fact that I didn’t even stop to think about how temperatures that low would affect my camera. I was so stoked to find the location above just before dawn that it never even occurred to me that my camera might become one with the frozen landscape and turn into a solid chunk of ice.

Now, I’m not completely oblivious to how to handle my camera in cold weather and this is not the first time I’ve been out in the snow. However, I’m sure it was the coldest I’ve ever been in. Which, I was reminded of when I accidentally let out a breath while looking through my viewfinder and noticed that the back of my camera was instantly covered in a sheet of ice. That rendered my rear display absolutely useless. Shortly after that, I noticed that the top LCD display wasn’t showing anything legible. Uh-oh. At this point I had luckily taken the photos I wanted, so I headed back to the car. I put my camera in a plastic bag to thaw out (quick tip! Putting the camera in an airtight bag when going from cold to hot prevents condensation) and hoped that I hadn’t done any permanent damage.

Before I packed up, I grabbed a few more angles that I was scoping out while waiting for the light. I just loved this pile of broken and shattered ice that appeared to be have been swept into this pile in the middle of nowhere.

Then as the sun rose, I grabbed a shot of the same scene from above with the sunlight illuminating the edges of the ice. The timing on this shot was critical, since if I had waited too long, the sky would have lost it’s colour. While waiting for the sun on this shot was actually when I realized my camera was going cryogenic on me. I’m torn between which of these I like best. I love the blue and purple hues from the predawn shot, but this one has some very interesting shadows and colours on the ice… I guess I don’t really have to choose!

Before heading back to the car, I took one last photo of the sunrise. Since it was directly into the sun and I wanted to retain some detail in the ice and the sky, I bracketed this shot (5 frames) and processed it into an HDR image. I wish I had more time to explore and shoot some of these ice formations, but by this time my camera had gone into hibernation and I had used up all the good morning light anyway.