Category Archives: Water

Snowy Fall Cattails, Vermont, 2011

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I’ve been meaning to post this for a good while, probably over a year. This is only the second cattail-featuring photo I’ve published, despite some lifetime affinity for the plant. The first one is here. This older image, embarrassingly, has been mis-linked for a while on the site, fixed now.

When I was a kid I had a thing for cattails, because they were where the frogs and turtles were. They were exotic plants, somehow eradicated from the suburbs where I lived. If I saw them through the car window, I wanted out of the car, right then, and to run to that spot.

Later, I came to see beauty in the rhythmic semi-chaos and lyrical arcs and juts and dips of them. Now that I have a patch of them in a little pond, I sometimes pull them out so they don’t spread too much and fill the pond, as they will. Still, lucky to have some, and certainly lucky to have a pond.

We just got a bit of snow late last week, quickly gone; it’s been unusually mild again this early winter here in Vermont. No snow on the green cattails this year. Despite the mildness, it is December, and the still-got-some-chance vibrance is gone from the leaves.

On a morning like the one this exposure was made, I might dash out with one camera, or load up with as much gear as I can carry. In this case I had both the DSLR and the compact camera. Though the compact “isn’t as good” as the bigger camera, sometimes that is the device that really nails it. On this morning I’ve got several more good exposures, and many of them are from the compact. This image was from a really good morning with the camera. I really need to work on some more of these!

Water Weeds, Autumn Foliage Reflections, Hartland VT 2010

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Sometimes in the Autumn I go mad with the push/pull I feel in photography. On the one hand, here in Vermont at this time the landscape is the kind of beautiful that would be worth traveling half way around the world to experience. On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid cliche.

On one hand, the colors are vibrant and electric, the environmental energy is dynamic and constantly fresh: moving from heavy gloominess to bright, crisp, sharp and thousands of shades between. And on the other hand, the plants are dying, the days are shortening, and we’re spending much more time indoors.

On one hand, this is one of the most clear manifestations of the changing of seasons, touching into the eternal cycle of life on our planet, a timeless quality. On the other hand, here in Vermont there are so many gardening and household chores to do, that it’s hard to find a moment to look up and pick up the camera. And that struggle starts after I manage to get away from my desk. Luckily (though not from the photographer’s perspective), work always seems to gear up at this time of year. It’s our constant human dilemma: existing in eternity, with the capacity to touch the timeless — but stuck in time and too busy to look up and notice.

So here, I found a bit of time to look, opened up, avoided cliche (I think) and made an image I like. This is literally in my backyard, our little pond reflecting our maple trees.