Lessons Learned: Reflections are Fun!

Did you notice that at least half the images in this gallery include reflections in water? I must have had water on the brain this year.

But what's more fun than a reflection? It can effectively double the impact of your subject, simply by reproducing its color and shape twice in mirror-image. Reflections alone, without showing the original subject, can produce wonderfully abstract compositions. And what denotes peace and quiet more effectively than a bucolic scene reflected in still water?

This particular shot reflects more than its own image for me personally. Last year, I visited this location in a dense fog and recorded an image of the trees and their reflections in a soft, misty composition that looked like a winner the moment I viewed it on the digital camera's little LCD screen. Unfortunately, that picture was on the ill-fated CD (I was shooting with the Sony Mavica CD1000, which uses three-inch CDs to record the images) that got broken before I could transfer the pictures to my computer.

This year, I returned to the location three times hoping for a re-enactment of the fog scene, but as luck would have it, the weather was largely uncooperative throughout my 10-day stay this year, and this image - shot on my last day in Maine - was the best I could show for the effort.