There are many ponds and small lakes where I live, but their shores are almost completely out of reach; they are either in private property or blocked by reeds. Except for a few tiny spots, one is basically left with two options: trespassing or the use of a drone. I use both, but like, actually, none.
I rarely grab the drone, because I prefer to see in front of my eyes what I am going to photograph rather than operate through a display. But the above mentioned obstacles leave no other options, and on that particular day (January 2026), I was anyway poised to search for ice patterns on one of the lakes. They are a rare occurrence here in Southern Germany, because the temperatures rarely drop for several days in a row, consistently below zero.
I try as much as possible to find an additional layer of meaning in my photographs, besides the most obvious one. I try to render an idea or a metaphor. Most of the time, it doesn’t work, and what I get is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. This time, I was determined not to even look at the usual circles with a crack in the middle – the internet is full of these patterns, all of them spectacular, but I saw no need for me to add one more. And I had luck indeed and found pretty soon the present motif, which from the very beginning reminded me of trees along an alley or a hill. To me, the scene looked actually like a simplified image in a children's book, reduced to very few lines meant to suggest the idea of trees in an alley and not really depict those trees. I don’t have a clue how big or small those patterns really were – not being there, it was difficult to say.
Back home, I was disappointed to see that the photograph was way too soft. Since there was not enough light in the previous evening, I had to enhance the ISO and the aperture, and my drone is not that good in bad light conditions. So, I went again the next morning, but I had to be there before the sun hit the surface, because I wanted that night sky effect over my imaginary trees, and thus again, the drone delivered a photograph which was somewhat better but still not sharp enough. So, I had to live with it as it was.
In terms of processing, I did very few things. I used the Nick filter “Details Extractor” because I thought the rough surface of the ice would thus look more like a night sky with stars. And I reduced the blue tones. In hindsight, none of it was necessary. As of today, I would have liked the photograph to have more blue and fewer details. It would have looked even more like a stylised image in a children's book.
