Sunsets And Bling
For this photographer, the Spring of 2022 was rather barren. There were few opportunities to get the drone into the air, and few photographs that delighted me. So it’s wonderful to be back in the Thousand Islands this summer, on our boat Second Wind.
Now I revel in the beauty of the islands and the waters between. The ever-changing skies. The herons, hawks, and gulls. Early morning swims and dining al fresco. Esther and I call it our paradise.
From another perspective, these are not islands at all, but the tops of ancient mountains, long submerged under the flow of water from the Great Lakes. Mountains indeed, but shaved off long ago by glaciers, they don’t rise very high. There’s plenty of open sky where we can enjoy the vista.
I’d like to share with you a few of the aerial images I’ve taken here, glorious sunsets and beautiful jewels.
One quiet evening in mid-July, just as we were preparing supper, I noticed through the porthole that the sky was turning golden. I hastily excused myself from dinner prep, Esther graciously agreed, and I readied the drone.
As it ascended, I watched sun, water, clouds, and the islands combine to offer a number of beautiful images.
To the north, the clouds were dark, so dense with vapour that light could not penetrate them. The still water below them reflected their heavy gloom.
The sun itself shone through thin high cirrus cloud cover which, in combination with dust in the atmosphere, accentuated a yellow tone. Its trail across the waters toward the camera seemed almost as bright as sun itself.
As it sank lower, the sun imparted to everything else – to the misty sky, the reflective waters, the tips of trees on the islands – the same rich gold glow.
Meanwhile, the islands themselves resolved into dark abstract shapes paired with their own black reflections.
Within moments, the sun disappeared, the colours faded, and I recalled the drone. Time, at last, for supper.
A few weeks later, in early August, we tied up to a buoy beside Camelot, one of the glorious national park islands. From the deck of the boat I saw a sinister line of low clouds in the southwest. The clouds adjacent to it appeared higher and calmer. I guessed that the emerging sunset might be spectacular.
But Camelot Island itself stood in the way of the best view, so I launched the drone. By the time I had it flying, the colours had deepened. The storm clouds had taken on a purplish tinge. The setting sun was masked, behind the cirrus, but it retained the power to turn them a marvelous blend of red, yellow, and orange.
I took a few exposures from a low altitude, with dark trees in the foreground – a dramatic perspective in itself - then sent the drone higher. Now a handful of islands came into view, dark, still, and mysterious.
Reflected in the St. Lawrence River, the sky’s deep red dissipated as it spread, diminishing into a sheen on the surface of dark waters.
I could show you a hundred more magical sunsets from the islands, and maybe I will sometime, for I never tire of worshipping at nature’s colourful altar. But for now, let’s look at something quite different. By contrast with those literal images, there are times when the drone itself seems to work it’s own kind of magic of the imagination.
In early August, Esther and I took Second Wind east, anchoring for the first time at Constance, Grenadier, and Adelaide. They’re less familiar islands, farther from Gananoque than we usually venture. Here the drone captured many beautiful photographs, some of which I’ll share another time.
But here’s one that particularly caught my attention: a tiny rocky isle off the edge of Adelaide Island, inhabited only by a few strands of grass and bush.
In springtime, under high water, you might never notice it. Now, as the water level fell in late summer, it was exposed. Cracks, caused by ice or glacial scraping thousands of years ago, created the illusion of a giant’s hand pointing toward deeper water.
The exposed rock itself has a rosy glow, while the portion underwater is coloured by gold and green vegetation. A companion peak, to its side, not quite reaching the surface of the clear green water, shows similar shadings of gold and green.
So, the image interrogates us, is this a rock viewed from the air? Or could it be, perhaps, a complex piece of jeweller’s art?
A very different abstraction appeared to me the previous day. We discovered that Grenadier Island is very large with broad walkable trails. We anchored well away from the shallows that surround it, and dinghied in to explore. Back on the boat later, I launched the drone to investigate it from an aerial perspective.
As the mechanical bird hovered over the island, it displayed two of the interlinked marshes that dot the island landscape.
For me, their reflection of sky and cloud suggested moonstone, a jewel that features a cloud of blue in a milky white stone, here in the setting of a lush green forest.
Beyond sunsets and bling, this summer the Thousand Islands have offered a wealth of perspectives, encouraging me to take photographs almost every day. I’ll share more with you soon.
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