The Humber In Winter

For a landscape photographer, capturing images from a drone in the wintertime is a challenging procedure.

It requires abundant warm clothes, warm drinks, and a fanatical tolerance for discomfort.

The worst part of it is the finger-numbing management of the remote controller’s touch screen. So, yes, it’s difficult.

And yet.

And yet, every season has its positive peculiarities. Springtime is replete with fresh leaves and flowering trees. Summer is easy-going and lush. Autumn offers wonderful colours.

And winter, because the landscape is reduced to basics, is the time of abstraction. For the artist who revels in shapes and patterns, for the artist who sees literal images as merely one aspect of creativity, wintertime offers abundant opportunities.

Once my poor injured drone was repaired (see “The Niagara Fall” blog), and the sun was shining, I set out on an excursion to photograph the Humber River. Pushing through dense bush and arriving on its bank, I could almost feel the rush of water – so cold that, if it weren’t moving really fast, it would have frozen in an instant.

The river, surrounded though it is by the concrete city, seemed to me to retain much of its natural energy, its uncompromising wildness.

I launched the drone and sent it up high. At maximum altitude, it portrayed the Humber curving gracefully, ripples forming in the shallows, some ice around the rocks. And a striking contrast between its two banks.

On one side lay nature’s disorder, random, gala, the naked woods. On the other sat the prim, manicured shapes of an urban golf course.

Having captured that image, I dropped the drone until it was almost touching the water, seeking a contrast. Scooting along just above the surface, I discovered an intriguing spot where a few patches of ice had managed to form.

Smooth abstract curves gathered there, like plump dancers around the yellow stones. The borders of these magical shapes hinted at the liquid pathways through the shallows, while in the further distance, quick-moving water reflected back a brilliant blue sky.

Once I’d photographed the Humber from multiple angles, I guided the drone back to earth and travelled to a site a little further away.

There I discovered a very different artifact of winter, this one man-made: an enormous fabric dome providing protection and warmth to the players on half a dozen tennis courts.

When the drone looks down from a great height, it is very good at capturing patterns. Here it photographed two forms, contrasting yet inextricably linked by a single sport.

Half of what it saw was a group of uncovered outdoor tennis courts contained within two red rectangles. Inside those red borders lay the precise geometry of the courts, six green rectangles. And each court was further sub-divided into six rectangular regulation zones.

And lest that patterning seem a little too tidy, the aerial view showed a variation. Only three of the courts were actually provided with nets, to tempt the hardy outdoors players.

The other half of the image was a simpler, somehow more organic form, the inflated winter dome. A voluptuous shape maintained by air pressure, its curvy shelter juxtaposed against the brisk flat rectangles of the exposed outdoor courts.

And against its white skin, the shadows of light standards leaned in, bending gently like palm trees on a sweet, warm Caribbean beach.