I almost stayed home. The sky was flat, the light was dull, and it didn’t feel worth the effort.
But I hadn’t been up to 3 Mile Point in a while, and something nudged me to go anyway—just to look. Not necessarily to shoot. Just to scout, maybe.
And that’s when the light shifted—just a little. The clouds thinned, the tones softened. A subtle color and texture emerged—the kind that doesn’t announce itself. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it.
This is the time of year when the landscape doesn’t give much away.
The tree in this photo is still asleep. The lake is calm. The hills are bare. There are no bright colors, no soft petals, no birdsong to fill the air. Just quiet. Stillness. Waiting.
Later in the spring, and during the summer, the landscape is full of activity. There’s color and activity everywhere. You could walk outside with your camera and trip over a dozen things worth shooting. But now? This is before the show. Nature is only beginning to wake up.
You have to really look.
That’s what I love about photographing this time of year. It teaches you to slow down—to notice form, light, texture. To notice the way a branch curves, the way a sky reflects, the way a scene *feels* even when nothing is happening.
There’s growth in that—not just for the trees, but for the photographer as well.
📷 From the Field: Notes on the First Image
This was one of my first landscape images using the Fujifilm XF 16–55mm f/2.8 WR Mark II, shot at 21.2mm, f/8, ISO 640, 1/80 sec. It was handheld in soft light, with just enough dynamic range to pull detail from the sky and silhouette the tree cleanly. As with most of my other images, it was shot in RAW format so the camera records all the details but doesn’t make any adjustments. I then bring it into Adobe Lightroom to handle exposure and contrast adjustment, and make some color corrections if needed.
I chose this composition knowing there were distractions—a row of trash bins and some pavement—but this was the framing that felt right. I tried other angles to avoid the extra items, but the way the trunk split and opened toward the lake made this the image I wanted. I removed the bins in Photoshop as a last resort—not to fake the scene, but to let the scene I saw come through more clearly.
The processed version leans into mood, with darker tones at the base of the frame to draw focus upward. It holds a kind of quiet tension that mirrors the season—everything poised, but not yet awakened.
I’ll be sharing more from this early spring stretch in the coming weeks as the transition to spring continues in Central New York.
If you’ve found something beautiful in between the obvious moments, I’d love to hear about it.
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