Tag: lake

Categories
All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Bristol’s Forgotten Ice Pond

Becalming Birge Pond (Hoppers Birge Pond Nature Preserve, Bristol, Connecticut)
“Becalming Birge Pond”
Hoppers Birge Pond Nature Preserve, Bristol, Connecticut

In my piece, “Becalming Birge Pond”, colors streak across a sunset sky over Central Connecticut as the first day of summer comes to a close on the mirror-like waters of Birge Pond.

Centuries-old ponds and waterfalls that once powered streamside mills are quite prevalent in my work, especially because most have long-since been retired from serving industrial purposes and blossomed into places of natural beauty. Birge Pond may have had similar origins and enjoys a similar golden era in its “retirement”, but its final stint of commercial use in the early 1900s was of a sort that has largely been forgotten in modern times. Consider that, prior to electric refrigerators becoming a widespread appliance, cooling food or drink during the warmer months of the year meant storing it in an insulated icebox beside a brick of ice. But if there weren’t refrigerators in homes, and if ice couldn’t be produced using industrial freezers, then how in the world did folks find ice for their iceboxes in the middle of the summer?

Birge Pond was one of many long-standing “ice ponds” across Connecticut which, once naturally frozen in the wintertime, would be harvested of its ice. The large, quarried ice blocks would then be tucked away in spacious barns to be stored and eventually sold throughout the coming year. Proper ventilation and generous packings of hay for insulation were actually so effective that some ice houses, such as the Southern New England Ice House that operated on Birge Pond, could reportedly keep ice for up to a couple years after harvest!

The industry of harvesting and selling ice was so essential and so ubiquitous in those earlier days that it probably seemed as if it’d be around forever. But as innovators worked through various ways to incorporate refrigerants into early designs of “electric iceboxes”, everything began to change. The Southern New England Ice House on Birge Pond was shuttered in 1933 and torn down shortly afterwards. Refrigerators became commonplace by the 1940s and ice harvesting, a widespread and commonplace industry just a few decades earlier, was relegated to the history books.

Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing

Click here to visit my landing page for “Becalming Birge Pond” to buy a beautiful fine art print or inquire about licensing this image.

Want to See More?

Be sure to check out more of my work from Bristol, Connecticut.

Categories
New Print Releases

A Vista Fit for Making Memories

Memorial Vista (Memorial Point on Lake Tahoe, Incline Village, Nevada)
“Memorial Vista”
Memorial Point on Lake Tahoe, Incline Village, Nevada

Snowy evergreen forests and jumbles of massive boulders meet with the placid waters of Lake Tahoe at Nevada’s Memorial Point. Dreamy, snow-capped mountains loom on the far shore, their precipitous slopes and jagged profiles plainly visible even at a distance of 20 miles.

For somebody such as myself, born and raised in Connecticut, the vast panorama of open water and mountain scenery offered by Lake Tahoe is truly otherworldly and enchanting. If the scenery isn’t amazing enough, it’s also numerically impressive on several metrics. At an elevation of more than 6,000 feet and with a surface area of 190 square miles, there is no other alpine lake so large in the entire nation. And remarkably, Lake Tahoe’s greatest depth approaches 1/3 of a mile, making it the second deepest lake in the country (just behind Crater Lake at 1,900 feet deep).

New Englanders accustomed to seeing their local lakes vanish beneath sheets of ice each year will surely be interested to discover that Lake Tahoe doesn’t freeze over, despite temperatures reminiscent of Northeastern winters and an average snowfall of 125 inches each season. How is that possible? Well, it’s complicated actually, but the abridged explanation is that the lake’s extreme depths help it to retain the heat stored up in its waters over the warmer months. Even in the coldest of winters, the main body of Lake Tahoe rarely ever drops lower than 40° F.

Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing

Click here to visit my landing page for “Memorial Vista” to buy a beautiful fine art print or inquire about licensing this image.

Want to See More?

Be sure to check out some of my other work from Nevada and California.

Categories
All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Arise McDonough

Arise McDonough (Lake McDonough, Barkhamsted, Connecticut)
“Arise McDonough”
Lake McDonough, Barkhamsted, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

Nestled amidst a sprawling evergreen forest, the mirror-smooth waters of Lake McDonough lay in shadow even as the first searing beams of morning light break over nearby hilltops and cast a fiery glow upon the woodlands at the water’s edge.

"McDonough Daydream (Lake McDonough, Barkhamsted, Connecticut)
“McDonough Daydream”
Lake McDonough, Barkhamsted, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” So said the celebrated Mark Twain, whose words echo the bitterness which surrounded Connecticut’s hundred-year quest to build enough reservoirs to satisfy the water needs of its crowded capital region. Lake McDonough, at 400 acres, is among the more modest components of that system. Between the 1850s and 1960s, several dams were constructed in the hills west of the metropolitan area, completing a network of reservoirs that collects water from 90 square miles and provides for hundreds of thousands of people in Central Connecticut.

Interestingly, the dark side of this otherwise admirable accomplishment is nowhere in sight. That’s because rural towns and valley farms that found themselves in the path of these impoundments were buried without a trace in watery graves, sacrificed without ceremony in the struggle to secure mankind’s oldest necessity.

Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing

Click here to visit my landing page for “Arise McDonough” to buy a beautiful fine art print or inquire about licensing this image.

Want to See More?

Be sure to check out all of my work from Lake McDonough, Saville Dam & Barkhamsted Reservoir.

Categories
All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Waking the Shadows of Mount Tom

Waking the Shadows of Mount Tom (Mount Tom State Park, Litchfield, Connecticut)
“Waking the Shadows of Mount Tom”
Mount Tom & Mount Tom Pond,
Mount Tom State Park, Litchfield, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

A flurry of shoots all over Connecticut and Massachusetts during this past autumn has left me with a backlog of some 2,000 photographs which I’ve been meticulously processing since mid-December. There’s so much new imagery that I’m eager to share over the coming year!

For now, I’d like to offer a couple pieces that I finished developing last night. In “Waking the Shadows of Mount Tom” (at top), we find ourselves amidst lily pads and grasses on the shores of Mount Tom Pond during mid-October. Sunlight breaks over mist-laden hills in the distance as dawn lends comforting warmth to the landscape. The same luminous morning offered a dreamy backdrop for “They Who Dwell in Reflections” (below), in which we find a solitary boat of fishermen amidst the the majesty of autumn forests, morning haze and the mirror-like waters of the pond.

They Who Dwell in Reflections (Mount Tom Pond, Mount Tom State Park, Litchfield, Connecticut)
“They Who Dwell in Reflections”
Fishermen on Mount Tom Pond,
Mount Tom State Park, Litchfield, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

Despite being a fairly small lake, at only about 55 acres, Mount Tom Pond actually straddles a “tri-point” of town boundaries. So while the bulk of open water is in Litchfield, the southern end of the pond reaches into Washington and the eastern shore of the pond falls within in Morris.

Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing

Visit my landing page for “Waking the Shadows of Mount Tom” or “They Who Dwell in Reflections” to buy a beautiful fine art print or inquire about licensing these images.

Want to See More?

Be sure to check out all of my work from Mount Tom State Park.

Categories
All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Lakewood Shimmering

Lakewood Shimmering (Great Brook Reservoir at Lakewood Park, Waterbury, Connecticut)
“Lakewood Shimmering”
Great Brook Reservoir at Lakewood Park, Waterbury, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

With over 3,800 people per square mile, the crowded city of Waterbury in Western Connecticut is among the last places you might expect to find natural beauty. Don’t count it out entirely, though: the calm waters and wooded hills of Great Brook Reservoir on the east side of the city, seen here in my piece “Lakewood Shimmering”, are a welcome escape from the concrete, brick and asphalt.

It’s hard to imagine that when Waterbury was settled by Europeans in the late 1600s, the Central Naugatuck Valley was still a vast frontier of wooded hills. In fact, townspeople referred to the settlement by its Native American name, “Mattatuck”, for the first decade of its existence.

Waterbury’s rocky landscape made for terrible farmland and the town’s growth stagnated for a century. When brass manufacturing took off in the 1800s, though, Waterbury became an industrial powerhouse —the “Brass City”— and began to grow rapidly.

Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing

Click here to visit my landing page for “Lakewood Shimmering” to buy a beautiful fine art print or inquire about licensing this image.

Want to See More?

Be sure to check out all of my work from Great Brook Reservoir and Lakewood Park, including the photograph seen above.

Categories
All Things Connecticut New Print Releases

Quiet Waters at Juniper Hill

Juniper Hill Pondside (Sperry Pond, Juniper Hill Preserve, Middlebury, CT)"
“Juniper Hill Pondside”
Sperry Pond at Juniper Hill Preserve, Middlebury, Connecticut
© 2014 J. G. Coleman

My new release this week, titled Juniper Hill Pondside, comes to you from Sperry Pond in the wooded northeastern corner of Middlebury, Connecticut. I learned of this small nature preserve not long after moving to Western Connecticut and I’ve since visited a few times throughout different seasons. On this particular morning in early September last year, I observed a beautifully moody display as the clouds sprawled across the sky over shadowy woodlands, reflecting from the mirror-like surface of Sperry Pond.

Juniper Hill Preserve was donated to the Middlebury Land Trust by Mark and Lem Sperry and certainly makes a handsome contribution to the town’s open spaces. The pond itself seems to be well on its way towards becoming more of a wetland than a proper pond, for aquatic plant life can be found crowding most of the surface by summertime. However, there’s no doubt that wildlife still manages to find plenty of habitat here. Hikers and nature lovers, for their own part, find a welcome respite at this quiet preserve on Sperry Pond.

Want to See More?