Maple fall
- 📍 Location: Lac Inférieur, Le Vésinet, Yvelines, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
For about ten days each autumn the maples along this bank turn a red so saturated that the water underneath stops being water and becomes a second sky. I framed the scene as a tunnel: branches closing overhead, the channel running away to a bright opening at the far end, everything else red.
The composition is almost symmetrical, and I let it be. The reflection is not a trick of the lens but the real geometry of the place, and fighting it would have weakened the picture. I set the horizon line exactly on the waterline so that the eye cannot easily tell which half is the tree and which half the mirror.
Fallen leaves float on the surface and hold the foreground together, giving the eye somewhere to rest before it travels down the channel. They also date the image to the hour: a week earlier they were still on the branch, a week later the wind had taken them to the bottom.
What I feel here is impatience more than calm. This colour does not wait. Every year I watch the bank and every year it turns over almost without warning, and the whole photograph is the small triumph of having been there on the right morning.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
