When rivers freeze...the mighty Housatonic River

We've been having a very brutal winter here in New England as you probably know if you're been watching the news and certainly know if you live here. I live near the Housatonic River, a major New England river that starts in western Massachusetts and flows about 150 miles to Long Island Sound. I've lived here most of my life and I have never seen it this frozen before. The channel that you see in the middle photo (immediately above) was cut early this morning by a fishing boat heading to work in the Sound (I shot these later in the day). In order to get out of the river, it was using a crane to bang a large metal cage on the ice and break a path.

In the top photo, everything you see that is frozen is normally river--and a tidal river at that. If you look carefully to the right, you can see the bank and the frozen marsh grass. The shot below is a field of broken ice (probably created by the fishing boats) and some of those shards are big enough to stand on. I don't like cold weather much, but I have to admit that getting out there and being in it and photographing it is a lot more fun (and encouraging) that hiding from it. I used plus-1 stops of exposure compensation to keep the snow from underexposing and I shot all of these without a tripod, which is unusual for me--there simply was no safe place to plant a tripod.