I thought I would start a new series and post from time to time explaining the thought process and workings of making a particular image. My first in the series is for "Artesian Spring".
When I awoke this morning, it was an unusually cold 17 degrees. I have been in much colder conditions, but for Central Georgia, it is COLD. But I love the cold weather and always layer appropiately for the low temps. So I decided to head over to my family's property just a few miles away to see if any of the streams had frozen over. My intent was to do some close-up photography of some ice patterns formed where the edge of the bank meets the creek. I went light this morning carrying a camera and two lenses and my tripod. As I arrived at the edge of the woods and began my hike, I realized that the stream was probably moving too swiftly to allow for frozen patterns anywhere. So I scoped the area out for a few minutes before deciding that I was not going to find exactly what I was looking for. So I headed back to the truck and decided to stop off at a place where there was a seasonal spring where I used to play as a child. There is an area in the woods that separate two of the largest pastures that used to be my Granddads farm. During the winter and times of heavy rains, the "gullys", as we used to call them, would fill with water and become a raging mini river. So during these times, I would often find myself hiking down through them and exploring nearly every sqaure inch of the stream and waterfalls that were created here. As I walked along the top of the "gully", which now were over 20 feet deep in some areas, I found a couple of areas where deep water had become trapped, & had frozen over because of the cold temps over the last several days. These pools of water take on a beautiful sea foam or emerald green color and are sometimes 6 or so feet deep. I am told that the reason for the beautiful color is two-fold; one being that there is a bluish clay, possibly kaolin, in the soil, and the other reason is the natural matter from the leaves and such that fall in and end up decaying and giving off different colors. Whatever the reason, they are a beautiful color. So after some effort in scouting out for the best location, I decided that I would set up on the very edge bank some 25 feet above the pool below. I ended up shooting some 6 or 7 images until I felt I was pleased with what I had. I then decided to figure out some way to get down into the small canyon, but it would be no small feat as the banks were straight down all around with nothing to hang onto and keep me from winding up on my back in the middle of the pool. So I backtracked some 200 yards to a place that was somewhat easier than the others and preceded to slide down the bank on my backside until I reached the bottom. I then had to hike upstream and around numerous other pools of water to get to a location at the edge of the pool. I then took another series of shots until I was pleased with what I had before making the return trip back to the truck. The equipment used here was a Nikon D800E camera body with a 24-120 lens with polarizer, and a 14-24mm lens. Everything, like 99% of all my other images, was shot with camera mounted to an RRS carbon fiber tripod. Thank you for looking and feel free to contact me via email with any questions. Have a Blessed weekend.