I know you’ve gotten the pattern down and are keeping track, so I don’t have to tell you what folder this comes from; it’s a mere accident of timing that it coincides with the end of the month, and if I felt like cheating, I’d let this serve double duty, but since I already have a month-end abstract, I’ll keep the post count up.
And we’ve seen this causeway from the top, but now we have to view it from the underside. In fact, if you look carefully at that linked photo, you’ll see a distant sign just left of center in the image, and a break in the guardrails right next to it; that’s the head of the stairs that led down the water level and access to this point underneath. I took up a very careful position down there to line up the repeating patterns of the support columns, and liked the pelican for its intrusion into this pattern, except I think it grounds it a bit too much in mundanity. As can be seen by the vertical striped stains on the horizontal crossbars, this locale was a huge favorite of perching birds: pelicans, cormorants, anhingas, ducks, the occasional heron, and so on.
But wait! I captured something else too, wholly unintentionally, and didn’t even know it until editing the photo quite some time afterward. Way in the distance, hundreds of meters off on the other side of the channel and causeway, someone crossed the frame along a similar pathway as my own – shame they never thought to stop and take a picture, ’cause we could have had some weird kind of synchronicity thing going on. Trust the other person to screw up a great opportunity…
Looking at this now I realize that, had I been down there at the right time, I could have caught a sailboat passing through the channel, right in mid-pattern – might have made a cool composition. I’d shot a couple from the top of the causeway, but didn’t really hang around on the underside much because there wasn’t any reason to. Even my snorkel spots were a ways behind my shooting position, in shallower water and well away from the possibility of oblivious boating traffic. I’d say something like, “Maybe next time,” but I’m honestly considering the chances of my returning to this area pretty low right now; the next Florida trip is likely going to be aimed at more scenic and productive areas for photography, mostly the Gulf coast and the Everglades. But we’ll see.