Central Ohio Winter: Inniswoods Abstracts

On my winter excursion to Inniswoods, I found ice. There are a couple of places where I seek out ice at Inniswoods. One of them is the frog pond and the other is a pond near the top of the park. This latter pond often has lily pads in the summer and when they survive into the winter, they are wonderful to shoot frozen into the ice. It’s a crapshoot as to whether they are there. This year, they weren’t. I was able to get a few shots at the frog pond that I really liked, with reeds growing out of the ice into some interesting shapes. There were also some leaves along the edges of the pond that made for nice abstracts.

As I was on the trail I take to leave the park, I noticed an area that had standing water just above the creek. It was a lot of water around a stand of trees and there were lots of leaves from the fall that were on the ground. These are among the best conditions for me to find the ice that I love to shoot. The temperatures were below freezing, so I knew I was going to get ice. There were so many leaves, that I also knew I was going to get color under the ice. If you shoot enough of this stuff, you develop a pretty good idea about what you are going to get.

Besides the wonderful colors, ice offers up just amazing textures and patterns. In many places, the ice forms like an etching. I love the patterns that are formed from the ways this freezing takes place. If you look at these images full screen, which I highly recommend, you will see that the ice is far from flat or uniform. There are often interesting textures and patterns in the surface shapes of the ice.

It was all there on the ground for me to capture and I’m sure I spent a very long time with the camera pointed down into the ground finding the best abstracts. The challenge for me is to find and frame the most interesting and beautiful abstracts from a very large area. As with all of photography, you have an entire universe in front of you … how do you decide what you are going to capture in that very limited frame.

When I am shooting ice, I look for leaves under the ice because I love the colors they provide. I prefer that everything I shoot is below the ice. I always prefer order in my images; neurotically ordered images … that’s me. Well, in nature, as in all of life, that’s difficult to achieve. Leaves and stems and other crap (some of it lovely and dead) often stick out of the ice or are lying on the ice. I try my best to work with what nature puts in front of me. Sometimes I can make these less than ordered images work and sometimes I can’t.

Another challenge for me is achieving perfect focus of the entire image. To achieve the best focus, I need to shoot the ice with the front of the lens of the camera exactly parallel to the ground (to the subject). For me to do so, I have to pick subject matter towards the edges of the frozen water or I have to deal with both getting my feet wet and stepping on potential pictures and ruining them. Neither of these options is okay with me. I try my best to capture images away from the edge by doing my best to get the subject in focus, and then to crop parts of the image where focus is just not acceptable. I am using a camera that captures a lot of pixels. Even the most severe crop is going to provide me with an image I can print and it will almost always look great on a screen.

I absolutely love shooting ice. I hope you enjoy looking at these images.