Pleasing and Teasing: Patterns Of Winter

An aspect of aerial photography that I find fascinating is how individual features of the landscape, when viewed from a height, often turn out to be less visually important than the remarkable patterns they contribute to.

 The images here, photographed in winter at various altitudes, remind me of the unique ability of shapes and patterns to please the eye and tease the imagination.

Tree Corner

One day in the countryside, I sent the drone off to search for images and discovered this meticulously designed stand of small trees near the intersection of two rural roads.

Bounded by roads on two sides and snow-covered grass on the third, this little garden seemed as if it were in wait for an aerial photographer to discover it. While it was certainly pleasing when seen from the ground, it was not nearly so striking.

To my mind, the image shows a playful perspective on visual mathematics.

To start with, there’s the triangular shape of the foreground, with its carefully arranged trees.

And then, as we look beyond the foreground, the roads stretch out of frame in the four cardinal directions. Thus they create four segments, each of which contains another triangle. It’s fun.

Ice Map

On a late winter day, I spot an entirely different pattern. This one emerged as the bay ice was melting in irregular shapes near the Leslie Street spit. As with the image above, it’s not a scene I would have thought to photograph from ground level.

But when I got back home to the darkroom (i.e. photo-editing software), I discovered I could experiment with tone and colour of the image. Over the space of an hour, this abstract emerged.

It reminds me of a map, with an island at left separated from the mainland at right. Or is it a lake surrounded by a snowy landscape? Or something else?

Forest Vertical

Here’s a forest I photographed from several angles, trying to capture a viewpoint that would release my mind from the shackles of the literal, allowing me to explore less conscious possibilities.

In this image, the trees are telling no literal story. They present pure pattern. Staring at them, I’m drawn into a dreamlike state.

Their trunks lean precariously outward from the center of the image. Yellow-green puffs, like smoke, erupt at random. Fallen trees are scattered haphazardly on the snow.

Yet there is one feature in this dreamscape that is not at all arbitrary. The late day sun creates long straight shadows that contrast with the snow, stretching from left to right in parallel lines.

Family Boardwalk

Here’s another pattern that could only be adequately captured from the air, a zigzag boardwalk near Richmond Hill that leads from a marsh into the woods.

To capture this image, I launched the drone and left it hovering in one place for several minutes. I simply waited, one eye on the viewfinder screen, one eye on the boardwalk. As people walked to and from the woods, I took a series of photographs.

Back at the darkroom, I settled on this family group, their bright jackets contrasting with the sepia landscape, the angular boardwalk contrasting with the anarchic forest.

Ice Fishers

One winter’s day when I was a child, years before our family owned a refrigerator, my dad drove us north on a mysterious journey to Lake Simcoe. Upon arrival, to our fear and delight, he drove our heavy car right onto the ice.

I had never seen, not even imagined, that a car could be parked on a lake.

Then we walked, the five of us, toward a busy workplace on the ice where, even more surprisingly, several heavy trucks were parked. There, laborers with enormous power saws shot sprays of water into the air, as they sliced up the thick ice. They hoisted each piece out of the water and loaded it onto one of the trucks.

Once on shore, the ice would be sawed into smaller chunks, and stored in sheds insulated with straw, waiting for warmer weather when we consumers would need it to cool our iceboxes.

But I’m digressing. Enough to say that it was many decades before I visited Lake Simcoe again in winter, this time to investigate the photographic possibilities of its famous array of ice-fishing huts.

Again, there were cars on the ice, but I wasn’t interested in taking any chances. I parked onshore and carried the drone out onto the ice.

Once I’d launched it, I was disappointed to see that the huts were too distant from each other to compose into the kind of image I was hoping for.

I had to reset my expectations. So I flew the drone north along Cook’s Bay in search of another perspective.

The aircraft had become a tiny dot, a kilometer away, when I realized that there was a different kind of picture available to me.

The crisscross patterns left by sleds and snow machines had created a canvas on which some cosmic artist had painted a party of human participants, their dark shapes and shadows a contrast with the bright snow and the reflected glare of the sun.

I’m not certain which aspect of this image I like best now, the people enjoying a day of recreation, or the patterns of the icy canvas on which they stand.

One thing is sure. As it so often does, winter has surprised me again.