Found Images (Sometimes you strike silver!)

Yesterday, at Sawhill Ponds with Dana Bove, we sauntered over to the creek on the west side of the Open Space property, not really expecting much. But, lo, what did we behold but a veritable gold mine of azure, silver, gold, and platinum. Maybe there was even some frankincense and myrrh there, too.

The nearly setting sun–its rays filtered through the thin cirrus just above the Front Range–and the light bouncing down from the pale blue skies, gave the rippled water a surreal gamut of form and color.

We experimented with various angles and a wide range of shutter speeds (we worked the scene, that is) looking for our personal “ideal” composition–in this case, one that would certainly be very abstract. We tended to agree that bumping the ISO up to 3200, and even 6400, worked well to keep the shutter speed high enough to nearly freeze the water, which made the swirling detail and bubbles even more visible. Longer focal lengths (telephotos) tended to isolate the details we were after, so that’s what we each used.

To show you the phantasmagorical scene that we were working with, here is a sample image straight out of the camera. This is a raw image (no in-camera processing) that I later converted to JPEG with no other adjustments:

Unprocessed image. Sawhill Ponds, Colorado, 2015

The color was so spectacular that, in this case, it became an important compositional element. Here are two examples, processed as I liked them, into color photographs:

Creek, #7. Sawhill Ponds, Colorado, 2015

Creek, #6. Sawhill Ponds, Colorado, 2015

The patterns also worked somewhat–but, perhaps in another creative direction–in monochrome. Here as another image processed through Silver Efex Pro, as I liked it best:

Creek, #2. Sawhill Ponds, Colorado, 2015

To run across a situation like this in Nature gives me such a full, satisfying feeling. Like Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you might encounter as you wander about with the intent of making a nice “found image”.