If you missed last week’s Picture of the Week, I started a new series on the bayous of East Texas (check it out here… also, you may see this picture again VERY soon 😉 ), which was a new destination for me this year. The first couple of days I shot there, I was totally captivated with the bald cypress trees themselves, and ended up taking tons of intimate shots of just one tree, or a small grouping of trees. As I was looking through my pictures one night at the cabin though, it occurred to me that I needed to try to tell a bigger story. With just intimate shots of the trees, you don’t get a true sense of what the swamp itself it like. For the shot above I decided to do just that. I floated out to the edge of the lake area so I could see several of the lone trees out in the center of the lake, with the surrounding bayou in the background. As the sunset, I got the perfect lighting on the trees!
For almost the entire time my buddy Steve and I were exploring the bayous, we had the place to ourselves. It was SUCH a neat experience. Maybe once a day a hunter could come by (duck hunting is evidently good there), and on one evening a few photographers floated through, but other than that, we got to enjoy the calm, quiet of the place all by ourselves, which is such a gift sometimes!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson