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.

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!

This print is no longer on the site, but let me know if you’d like to buy a print.