It had been a couple of weeks since I had been out with the camera, so, when I decided to get up one morning and get in some photography, I ran into my constant question. Where did I want to go?
I was facing some time constraints, so I needed to find a location that was somewhere close to home. A trip to the Big Dam Bridge seemed to be the perfect answer. I hadn’t been there since last summer, and I couldn’t remember ever having been there in the dead of winter, so I wasn’t sure what I would find. Regardless, it was going to be good to just get out for a little bit.
I parked at the trailhead of the Isabella Jo trail and started making my way down the path. It was a Monday holiday, so I was both surprised and thrilled to find that I was the only one on the trail. It was so quiet and peaceful, and I was absolutely enjoying it.
I walked for about thirty minutes before finding some patterns that had formed in the sand during the recent rains. I stopped to photograph them (although I haven’t figured out yet how to process them like I want) and continued on.
As I made my way back to the start of the trailhead, I came across this scene. I had noticed it earlier, but it just didn’t really inspire me enough at that time to get my equipment out. I don’t know if it was a change in the lighting or I was at a slightly different angle, but now it really caught my attention. My first thought was that the scene looked like a watercolor painting.
I set up my tripod and camera and began framing the composition. My main consideration was to eliminate as much as I could of the sky that was showing through the trees. Those areas were significantly brighter than the rest of the scene and would be distracting. Satisfied with the composition, I pressed the shutter button.
Like my image last week, the processing of this file was pretty basic. I lowered the texture and clarity significantly to reduce the sharp edges of the grasses and branches and to soften the overall picture. I then darkened the image slightly, reduced the color saturation just a bit, and added a touch of contrast between the brighter foreground grasses and the darker background limbs and trees. Finally, I cropped the image to remove some unsightly dark areas in the bottom left corner and a jumble of grasses in vines in the lower right corner, neither of which added anything to this final picture.