Captured in ice

view across icy field

Our third day under ice was the sunniest so far. I took my camera up into the field to try and capture some of what I’d seen yesterday, much of it blurred as my niece and I hurtled past on my old runner sled.

wild asparagus in ice

Even with a dusting of snow, a layer of ice really draws the eye to the wonder of natural forms. It literally and figuratively magnifies whatever it encases — here, the remains of a wild asparagus plant.

goldenrod in ice

Goldenrod comes in a variety of forms, depending on the species, but all of them are beautiful.

goldenrod seedhead in ice

Death never looked so fetching. As with those witch hazel flowers in the woods, ordinary goldenrod seedheads seem as timeless as insects fossilized in amber.

broomsedge in ice

But most glorious of all are the leaves of grass. Broomsedge, a native late-season grass closely related to little bluestem, is already handsome stuff without the effects of sunlit ice.

brome in ice

And the brome is always at its best in winter, when snow sets off the cursive brush-strokes of its leaves. The sun is so bright, I can barely see what I’m photographing and shoot almost at random, then do virtually no post-processing, but still the image turns out — as if, once captured by ice, it doesn’t really need to be recaptured, just transferred to a new lightbox.

5 Replies to “Captured in ice”

  1. Glad you’ns liked! One of the benefits of this new blog theme is that the main column is wider, so for the photos with landscape orientation I can use the next largest size supplied by Flickr (which is the same size I’d already been using for those with portrait orientation: 640 pixels on the longest size).

  2. I love the word “brome,” and I love the lines “And the brome is always at its best in winter, when snow sets off the cursive brush-strokes of its leaves.” And as a native of southeastern Ohio, I’m oddly moved to see the noun form “you’ns” in your reply. (I often heard “younses” as well as “you’ns” when I was growing up. A lovely blog, prose and pictures.

    1. Thanks! Yep, this is “you’ns” country. I usually write “y’all” for the first-person plural since more people are familiar with that, but it doesn’t come naturally. “Younses” of course is our equivalent of “all y’all” (unless it’s the possessive).

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