About This Picture

This picture was taken in September of 1998, in the Tuolumne Meadows area of Yosemite National Park, with a Nikon N70 camera, a Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 lens, and Fuji Velvia film.

This photo is special to me, because I think of it as my "first" picture. On my 30th birthday, I decided to take up photography, then bought myself a camera, a couple lenses, a couple books on the subject, and some film. Shortly thereafter, I headed to Yosemite National Park to get started. During that trip, this was the first picture I took, and this was the first picture in my life that I tried to compose (instead of just snap), and where I took conscious control of the focal length, focus, aperture, and shutter speed.

I was out in the early morning, after the first in a series of ice storms. I hiked around, my eyes on the ground in front of my feet, exploring the fantastic structures and patterns in the ice and frost. When I came upon this frozen puddle, it resonated with me. As I made the picture, I understood what subject matter interested me as a photographer, what kinds of photographic expressions I wanted to make, and how.

Beyond enjoying how the frozen puddle looks, and appreciating the universe's complex interplay of order and chaos that it represents, my favorite aspect of this picture is the puzzling nature of how this subject could have come to be.

I've spent a lot of time examining this picture, pondering how this concentric pattern came to form in the ice. My best hypothesis is as follows: I guess that the puddle full of water was slowly percolating into the ground overnight, while the temperature hovered right around the freezing mark, sometimes just a hair above, sometimes just a hair below. When the temperature dropped below freezing, ice formed from the outer edges toward the center. When the the temperature rose to just above freezing, the water's level dropped a little without any new ice forming. When the temperature dropped, again, the ice began again to form from the edges toward the center, now at a slightly lower level. This cycle happened about ten times, leading to the structure you see here.

This picture is part of an ongoing series, followed by Frozen Puddle 2.