River to the tree
- 📍 Location: Lac du Der, Champagne, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
The lake is drawn down in autumn and what it leaves behind is an enormous flat of dark mud with a single channel wandering across it. At first light that channel catches the whole sky and becomes a silver line on a brown plain.
I framed with the channel entering at the bottom and meandering back through the picture towards one small tree on the far shore. The line does not run straight — it turns three or four times — and following those turns is what gives the eye something to do in an otherwise empty foreground.
Cranes were coming off the water in small groups. I kept the frames where a few were high enough to sit in the pale part of the sky, because at that size they are punctuation rather than subject, and the picture is about the ground.
Thousands of cranes stage here every autumn and the noise before dawn is extraordinary. I turned my back on most of them to photograph mud and a channel of water, which is not the obvious decision, but it is the picture the place kept giving me.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
