Beauty can be found at the base of a culvert, you just need to look down.
The runoff from melting snow created shallow drainage pools along a nearby lakefront. Then at night, a thin layer of ice was formed by the freezing temperatures.
I captured this image just as the winter’s sun peered above the horizon. You can see where it’s hitting the lower right edge of the rock. It was the sun’s low angle and surrounding rocks that shaded the ice. This filtered intensity enhanced the feathered patterns within the ice. Most of the subtle details would have been blasted away by the mid-day sun (or melted for that matter).
Truth be told, I was mainly interested by the patterns within the ice. After all, it’s a photo of a rock sitting in a frozen, drainage pool. As photographed, the brownish, murky water in the original image just wasn’t doing the trick. So, I made the water a bit more blue, by lessening the yellows within ice cover. It was a subtle tweak that made a huge impact.
Frozen Leaves was photographed the same morning.