On Frozen Pond

It's the way that it goes for me. On Wednesday, I saw what I thought were interesting lines and shapes in the ice of the nearby pond. Sue took some pictures with her phone, but I did not have my camera, and I wasn't in a phone-photo sort of mood.

Next day, Thursday, I brought the beast with the beastie long lens. But, of course, snow had covered the lines and shapes.

I did what I could and looked for alternatives. This is the little peninsula (sounds grand but isn't) that juts into the pond. With clean snow in front and a sudden line of vegetation, I thought it worth a shot. I think I was right; I like it. The grasses at the back were farther from the subject than it appears; zoom lenses can compress distances.

Speaking of compression, from some distance I took a photo of the bit of open water amidst the frozen pond. It looks very narrow in the photo (telephoto effect again) in which you see abstract reflections. I almost never put borders on my images, but I did this time . . . and also once again on the final photo in this post. Sometimes you have to shake things up a little, but I won't do this much because I can't say that I like it.

I managed to isolate a couple of 'grasses' at the edge of the pond against the snow for a minimalistic look.

We made it past the pond to the river. There wasn't much to see, but I decided to take an image of four little agglomerations of ice that had formed around branches sticking out of the fast-flowing water. Call them ice skirts if you will. I fiddled a lot with this one too, including adding a narrow, white border that hardly shows up here against the blog background.

I like the first two photos quite a bit but the pond reflection one is doubtless better without the border. When I post a photo in my blog, it is not necessarily my forever final version but something that I did in the moment.