Melting Ice, Blackwell Lake, Illinois

This limited edition has been closed, no more prints available. Contact me with any queries.

Description:
Another very popular image, this was made on a cold day at Blackwell Lake forest preserve near Chicago. I saw that the tree was very striking against the lake, but the problem was the far shore was rather unappealing, and I couldn't get high enough to get the needed perspective to include all of the tree but exclude the shore.

I took the photograph anyway, but it languished in my file for a few months before I re-examined it and saw a solution. By cropping the image to remove the far shore, it solved the problem and changed the image completely. Cropping out the shore removes all context from the scene and it becomes a visual puzzle. The band of ice near the top of the scene has the look of sky, complete with clouds.

Many times I've been asked if this is a real photograph or some sort of composite - I can assure you that it is real, and a very good lesson in what's possible when you use the selective nature of photography to remove context from a scene.

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