Thaw

The day before, Austin and I had gone out for a nice walk at Green Lakes. We started near the camping check-in and walked through the frisbee golf course, cabins, campgrounds and up to the top of the hill at the Rolling Hills. We saw 2 pileated woodpeckers and assortment of squirrels and nuthatchers (I think).

I wasn’t going to make him stop, but as we walked across the parking lot near the kickball/baseball backstop, I pointed out some leaves in the melting ice that I thought might be appealing photographic subjects and made a quiet point to myself to try to return soon if the opportunity were to present itself, which it did today.

I parked at the same location and brought my Yak-Trax that I hadn’t had the occasion to use yet this winter. The crimp-ons proved to be a wise choice: the ice was melting, but there was still at least 2 inches of ice covering the entire parking lot. And while it made for hazardous walking conditions, the same ice created a nice opportunity to photograph leaves that had been blown over the already-formed ice earlier in the winter and frozen in the middle of the icepack that was being exposed mid-thaw.

While the scenes of leaves that had attracted my attention the day before were long since melted, there was one leaf that, coupled with the texture of the ice around it, really grabbed my attention. I setup my tripod and knew that I wanted to capture as much detail as possible, so I elected to shoot straight down keep the entire scene in the plane of focus, which allowed me (in turn) to use the high-resolution capture of the camera. The result is the first-ever image that I have captured that I would want to print extra large.

Resolute

I don’t think that it is necessarily beautiful. The light is pleasing, but not incredible. But that texture the ice … it is so pleasing to me (by clicking on the picture above to view it at 100% on Flickr). It is also something that can only be appreciated when viewed at 100% (by clicking on the picture above to view it at full-res on Flickr), otherwise, the bubbles in the ice will look like noise even in 8×10 prints, I think.