Mississippi River at Mud Lake Park and Marina, Iowa
I found a book under the Christmas tree, “Light on the Landscape” by William Neill, one of America’s most respected landscape photographers. It is a coffee table-style book with 128 wonderful photographs and comes with lessons incorporating photographic fundamentals, like light, composition, or exposure, but also other aspects, including nature stewardship, inspiration, self-improvement, and others. I just started reading but I’m already fascinated. One of the chapters talks about becoming a student of light and in particular at your own favorite locations over a long period of time.
For me one of these locations would be the entrance to the little marina down at Mud Lake by the Mississippi River. I have published many pictures from this vantage point on a dike and wrote about in the blog more than once that the light is never the same. There are times when I’m not even bother to take the camera out of the bag and others when I run to the end of the dike with the camera after getting out of the car, because light can change very quickly. I go to Mud Lake Park with our dog Cooper at least once a week, but even if no pictures are made, I always try to analyze why some things work and others don’t.
Same vantage point as the photo above but looking south. The main channel is behind the dike on the left. The backwaters of Mud Lake are one of our favorite places to paddle the kayak during the warm season.
William Neill writes about becoming an expert on a particular location. This may not fit a description about me yet, but any time I’m there I study the lighting conditions that occur, and absorb the beauty of the mighty Mississippi.
Today we had a pretty uniform overcast with no directional light but the different patches of snow, ice, and water created patterns that reflected the light in different ways and that we can see only at this time of the season when the river freezes over.
Nikon Z6II, Nikkor Z 24-70, f/4 S