Sawhill Ponds Reveals Yet Again

This place never ceases to astound me as a photographer. On the face of it, it is really nothing more than an old, somewhat dumpy, quarry area with a collection of shallow, swampy, ponds–but time has started to smooth out the scars and I almost never seem to go away from a photo visit without creating at least one good image, no matter the hour or the light.

A few days ago, we went for an afternoon walk around the ponds. The sun was still rather high…the light harsh. I had few expectations so didn’t bother with hauling the tripod along.

Still, Sawhill Ponds managed to rise once again to the occasion and show me something I had never seen before in my many, many trips out there.

Or is it that my creative eye is slowly maturing and is beginning to pick up on more sophisticated scenes?

…Landscapes that push beyond the boundaries of the traditional and the cliché, and on into the realm of the abstract…

First, here is a composition that appears quite busy at first glance, but is actually reasonably simple in terms of line, texture, and even form. Squint and blur your eyes and you might see what I mean. What caught my hairy eyeball was the way the winds were painting their way across the leaves and branches of a giant cottonwood tree–a tree with wonderful diagonals. The effect was almost surreal:

Autumn Wind. Sawhill Ponds, Colorado, 2016

Second, here is a reflection I had never before seen nor captured in quite the same way, a nearby power pole supplying a sort of vertical focal point. The unusually low water level certainly helped by adding the many textured layers:

Tower Reflection. Sawhill Ponds, Colorado, 2016

As Forrest Gump once famously said…”ya never know what yer gunna get…”

POSTSCRIPT: For those who are fans of the added element of color, here are the original versions of the above two photographs. I think I like them just as much as their monochrome clones. They are just different–the eye tends to move over the picture differently…notice different things. Which is better? I’m not sure…