Thunderbird Creek
Just go out the front door, walk across the street, go a few hundred feet through the woods and there you are! A beautiful river canyon complete with frozen falls. Thunderbird Falls, and Thunderbird Creek name this community. It is a beautiful area and a great place for a quick hike. Definitely a good place to take photos! Just the walk through the woods is magical this time of year. Everything is blue-white with snow. The light here has a definite blue-cast to it even on overcast days. When the sun is out, you actually do not see it. The sun hangs low on the horizon all day this far north and the Bear Mountain to the south blocks all sunlight in the winter so at best you are in the shade of a mountain.
Needless to say, I have to either bump the ISO up really high, or take long exposures. On my hike down to the creek, I just brought my Canon 1Ds and the 16-35mm lens and mostly just shot at 16mm. As a general rule, you can hand-hold a lens at a shutter speed down to the focal length of the lens. In other words, you should shoot no slower than 1/500 sec with a 400 mm lens, but with a 16mm lens, you can easily get away with a slow 1/20 sec. Of course with my long lens I have image stabilization so I can get away with speeds slower than 1/500 sec, but over all it is a good idea to keep the shutter speed above the focal length of the lens...Anyway, I did bring Tom's riggity tripod, but mostly I just hand held the lens and shot at 1/40 sec or so at f5.6 or so at an ISO of 200.
Although we did not venture over to the falls, maybe I'll do that again another day, but we did briefly explore all the icicles in the stream and along the banks. The 16mm setting gives great depth of field, really let's one focus close, and yet maintain a semblance of focus in the background. Most were taken right at ground level which gave fun perspectives, especially with the photo where I looked straight up. This is a pretty narrow valley and I was able to capture the trees on both sides with my ultra wide angle lens ;-)
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