Early Morning Dew

Listening to the alarm at 5:30am isn’t exactly what I would call exciting, but I know the potential is superb for some great photo opportunities, if I could just get myself out of bed. Of course I do get up, and once I’m awake I can rarely fall back asleep. I pack my gear into the car, which I had gathered together the evening before to save time in the morning, and I head out of town. I had no preconceived ideas of what I wanted to photograph or where I might go to find these images so I start watching the sky. I look for interesting clouds or a bank of fog over a low lying bit of land or maybe some ducks resting on a slough. Whatever catches my eye gets a more thorough going over to see if I feel I might be able to put together some ingredients for an image.

I ended up southeast of town by maybe 20km or so next to a large slough and noticed that the car’s thermometer was registering -4C. I started to watch for frost laden grass and fog rising over the slough. I spent some time in the dark just listening to the birds at the slough, as I had maybe 40 minutes or so before the sun was up. I had seen a bit of frost covered grass in the ditch only a few hundred meters before the slough, but decided to continue on with an idea of returning to the spot in a bit once it became lighter out. I am one of those people who really wants to see what is around the next bend in the road or over that small hill just ahead, and that is exactly what I did. There were a few things to see and photograph as the sun peeked over the horizon. I decided to head back to where I had first seen some grass in the ditch on the other side of the slough and up the road a ways. By now the air had warmed up sufficiently to melt the frost leaving many tiny droplets of water clinging to the individual blades. I searched through the tangled mess of grasses to find just the right combination of angles, and colours to make an image that captured the beauty I was seeing. It took a few minutes and once I located the spot I wanted to photograph I had to be very careful lining up my tripod and camera so as not to bump the leaves and lose all the tiny drops clinging to the blades.

Printed on Ilford Galerie Prestige 310gsm