W
hen I made my first abstracts of Lake Michigan—see those here—it felt as though I had entered a whole new world. No longer did I pass off that pastel expanse as un-photographable; I had found a way which did that vastness justice.
And so, when 2019's first blizzard let up and the clouds left the sky, I headed down to the lake with optimism, purpose, and a camera.
When I finally made it down to the lake, the beach was covered in ice. As I walked out past the normal shoreline, past submerged and frozen anchors of summer swim-buoys, I thought about how unfortunate it would be if my feet found a weak spot in the snow.
I reached the end of the solid ice and stopped. Up to this point, the thick ice, thicker than I am tall, was covered in a substantial layer of dense, frozen snow. However, past this point, the ice floated free. Chunks of ice about the size of a snow-angel undulated slowly on the dark, icy water. The western sky to my right was fiery, and it refleced on exposed patches of water and on the slick, white ice.
I stayed upon the ice for roughly 20 minutes, at which point my wind-bitten fingers no longer responded to my brain's plea to click the camera's shutter. In that time, I witnessed a wide spectrum of colors and a heard a symphony of silence. Here are some of the photos from that frigid evening which warmed my soul.
I was greeted by a quilt of rolling ice stretching out to the horizon.
While the water and sky reflect the bright pastels of the sunset, floating ice glows while in the sun's last light. The first of these two was taken minutes before the second; note the change in color after such a short time.
In the frigid, finger-gnawing, nose-biting air of these winter evenings, a certain tranquility prevails in the quiet solitude of the frozen world.
An island of ice rises foreboding above the icy waters of winter. Ice like this was my perch for the rest of these shots.
Icebergs drift out on the fiery lake.
Sun sunken and gone, a dim light prevails over the gloaming lake.