This is an aerial photo of McDowell Dam from last week. It was a very nice day, and the water was a-flowin’. There were rivulets of water ready to be reclassified as rivers in every low-lying area, guaranteeing the lake plenty of fresh runoff. It was a fantastic day, warm and sunny. Looking down at the ice, the cracks took on an organic nature. It reminded me of a butterfly wing or something.

I applied one of those filters you see on a lot of Facebook “photography” groups – you know, the ones where the sunrise or sunrise is so color-saturated that it makes your retinas hurt – in order to demonstrate the array of muted color beneath the ice. While some of those rivers of water rushing into the dam were relatively clean, some of them were pretty brown. The same goes for the water below the ice, apparently. Anyway, oversaturating the image gives it a much more visceral look, don’t you think?