Lower Sand Creek Winter Part 1 (Digital)

Here on Lake Pend Oreille the lake is lowered at the end of summer by some ten feet. This being my first winter here I have become fascinated by the exposed shoreline. It also means that due to laws regarding access to waterways and lakes that one is able to walk and fish and hunt these low water margins even if the high water shoreline is private property.

Lower Sand Creek runs into the lake here at Sandpoint and the lake in summer backs up a bay over the traditional last reach of the creek. So now the bottom of the bay is exposed and the original creek meanders over a barren frozen mud bottom smelling still of estuary mud and rotting vegetation.

And so I thought I should explore this mudflat with the creek edge in ice. Here it is bordered by houses and business on one shore and highway 97 on the other side. There are also some bridge crossings as well. It is busy and distinctly urban but also picturesque.

This afternoon did not seem promising with the thermometer hovering around freezing and a thick gray overcast hung over the scene with a dull desaturating light. Though hardly any breeze, hands left out were painfully cold after a short while. Still I ventured forth with my Fuji GFX digital. I decided to try out my recent epiphany about 35mm lenses shot with an Xpan crop (65:24 about 2.7:1) in black and white. Such a dull day seemed a good use of the black and white ‘recipe’ I developed in conjunction with this idea. (I covered this in an earlier blog post here…)

Today I broke out my Tokina 70mm-210mm f4 zoom for the Olympus mount. It turned out to be a wonderfully versatile lens for the day. Not as sharp or fast as my mainstay 135mm f2.8 prime, it served very well for these images where the subject matter is clear and simple, not demanding tricky depth of field compositions. I started shooting it at f11 and worked my way down as the light failed.

I walked the half frozen bay-bottom pock-marked with what I believe were little pits dug by fish for egg laying. Numerous goose and raccoon tracks were preserved in the frozen mud from when they scavenged after the water level fell. Now only a few ducks paddled the creek while the high-pitched witter of Osprey could be heard in the barren trees on the shore above the sound of cars and locomotives. I walked the mud bottom to the second railway bridge before the short day overtook me and I returned on the bike path.

I think it was a success. I stayed with the black and white Xpan format and really enjoy the look. The day was so bland that color images were almost black and white so drained of color were they by the light and bleaching effect of winter weather on the vegetation. The mud bottomed bay that at first seemed ugly is almost elevated with black and white. As the afternoon progressed towards sundown I found my ISOs started at 400 and ended at 6400. The light grain setting I think disguises well these higher ISOs, the result being the differences are hard to see.

My results below they are unedited so how they come out of the camera. Being a panoramic format they may be better appreciated by clicking on the to reveal a full screen width. They are scaled from their 25 Mpixel originals to 1 Mpixel of about 1200 pixels across so don’t suffer too much more zooming.