Buena Vista Lagoon

Author's Comments

Buena Vista is not a place that announces itself. You drive past it on the way to somewhere louder, and most people never notice that the freshwater on either side of the road is doing actual work - holding hundreds of species through the cold months, quietly, without fanfare. I come in January, early, before the light has fully committed. The water at that hour goes silver and the egrets stand in it like they have been placed there by someone with a steady hand. The Audubon center on the east end is where I always start. The platforms are elevated just enough to give you a clean line over the reeds, and the trail is short, which I have come to appreciate. This is not a place that requires a long walk. It requires sitting down. A 300mm lens is the minimum, and even then most of what you see will be too far for a frame-filling shot. The honest photographs here are the wider ones - the lagoon as a whole, the city held back behind the tree line, a single bird small in the composition with a great deal of water around it. Winter is the season. The wintering ducks bring color and motion, and the light through February is low enough to model the surface of the water without flattening it. Spring is also good, quieter in a different way, with the herons more active and the reflections cleaner in the still mornings. I have never come here and made a great photograph. I keep coming anyway. There is something about the scale of it, and the patience it asks of you, that I find I need.

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