Winter in Acadia

Scenes from Île des Monts Déserts

My photographic output this winter has been somewhat tame compared to years past. We moved to a new home over the holidays, and my ability to leave at the drop of a hat to chase light and weather has been curtailed due to changing childcare arrangements. That said, I have had three big adventures in the last month. One being my trip to Baxter State Park, photos to come, and the other two being photography workshops in Acadia that I co-led with John Putnam.

Disclaimer right off the bat is that any decent images I gather on these trips are mostly incidental. My primary focus is on helping students, but part of that is pulling out the camera and showing them things that are interesting to photograph. Here are a few of those things.

The first stop on the first evening was the ever-wondrous Jordan Pond. This is usually a great place to warm up the group, pun intended in this case, and we were treated to some fresh snow across beautiful black ice, making these cool patterns.

The next morning found us along Ocean Drive, a favorite spot with plenty of room to spread out with a group.

I found this little notch in the rocks to frame the sunrise reflections on the water. The pillows of snow on the rocks made a unique and interesting foreground, and the sky certainly didn’t disappoint.

We had some nice snow on the last day of the workshop, and we again took the group down to Ocean Drive. This time, instead of driving out here, we had to park the cars at Fabbri and walk in through all of the snow. This lone tree with Otter Cliffs in the background caught my eye as the sun came out while it was still snowing.

After we wrapped up, I took some personal time to go out on cross country skis around Eagle Lake. While I was skiing, I stopped to photograph the sun shining through these beautiful sweeping spruce boughs. It was magical!

More trees greeted us on our next workshop, which kicked off in heavy snow in Sieur De Monts. The birch-lined Jesup Path is a favorite location of most workshop groups. It’s easy to see why. I took a high-key approach with a shallow depth of field to come up with this more ethereal take on the oft-photographed subject.

We spent over two hours in here, and on the way out, with the light getting low, I stopped to photograph these grasses and tree trunks near the parking lot.

This is another ‘walking back’ find. I had been with the group photographing from Otter Cliffs the next morning, and when we were walking down, sunlight was streaming through this lichen-draped forest, creating an almost abstract scene of green, blue and gold. I liked how the sun was highlighting the ‘eye’ on one birch tree.

That evening it was back to Jordan Pond, this time with much more snow and a decidedly deep-winter feeling. A workshop student named Chris was set up here photographing the lone cedar tree, and I couldn’t help but be inspired by him!

Again, deep winter was the theme on the second workshop, in which we experienced not one, but two days of snow! These icicles on Ocean Drive were very hard to get down to photograph, but it allowed a composition that I haven’t seen photographed before here, a rare feat!

Here’s a spot a little further down after the sun came up.

This grove of trees on the way to Jordan Pond caught my eyes on the workshop, but I didn’t stop to photograph them until the festivities were over and I had time to myself to stop on this usually busy road and get out.

I then went over to Bernard and photographed the Bass Harbor fleet with beautiful spotlighting from the setting sun shining through clouds behind me. It illuminated Cadillac Mountain in the background really nicely, too!

These three buildings in Bass Harbor are pretty iconic, to my mind. I stopped to photograph them in the setting sun after checking out Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse.

Although the lighthouse wasn’t much to look at on this trip, these boats were a fitting end to my explorations here.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed re-living the trips with me! If you are interested in joining us next year, we have already arranged dates. We’ll be on the island February 5 - 8. You can learn more and sign up HERE.

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