Four Days in Januaryat Yates Mill Pond Park

Day 3

Jan. 11, 2026

On Jan. 11, I returned to Yates Mill Pond Park, but this time to photograph with a piece of gear I hadn’t used in a long time.

My Canon 7D has been sitting in an old camera bag in my office ever since moving to North Carolina, and I might have to go back to March 2015 in Indianapolis, when I shot photos for First Folio Productions’ rendition of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, that I last used the 7D.

So why now? It occurred to me on the drive home from the park visit on Jan. 9 that I might have better effective focal range trying to reach those hard to get waterfowl using the 7D crop-sensor camera along with my Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens and Canon 1.4 extender. So I resolved to return and try that gear when weather allowed, and that happened to be on the 11th.

It was on the chilly side Sunday morning, and sadly, the gaggle of geese that I’d seen on the pond at the same time on two previous visits, was not there. But I was gifted by the presence of what appears to be a great blue heron, which had not been on the pond on the previous visits. 

As the lead-off photo shows, the heron was along the shore, no doubt foraging for a meal, and I spotted it in the general vicinity of where I’d seen the geese on the previous visits, which was on the short side of the pond, the side north of the pedestrian bridge. 

I also saw some ducks, a pair on the same side of the pond, and five smaller ones on the big side. Also on the big side, camped out as usual on some driftwood in the water in the big side of the pond, were some other waterfowl whose species I wasn’t sure of. 

The 7D had a battery grip (which held two batteries) still attached, and I decided not to mess with. But combined with the heavy L lens and the extender, it reminded me why I haven’t used my two L lenses more often in recent years on long, multi-hour, walk-around shoots. It was heavy!

To view a full gallery of images from this shoot, follow the link in this sentence.

A mallard alone (above) and with his mate (below), where I saw them on the short side of the pond. It’s possible they are the parents of the smaller ducks pictured further down. The smaller ducks were on the opposite side of the pedestrian bridge in the big side of the pond. 

Above and below: A couple photos of the waterfowl crew hanging out on the driftwood in the big side of the pond. This crew has been there at the same time every day I’ve been in the park this month. 

Above and below: A couple more frames of the blue heron.

Four Days in Januaryat Yates Mill Pond Park

Day 2

Jan. 9, 2026

I told a longtime acquaintance that on my Jan. 9 visit to Yates Mill Pond Park, I felt unusually inspired as I encountered what seemed like unending appealing photo compositions. 

I was surprised because it was winter, and as I noted in the first installment of this series yesterday, I’d visited the park that day to walk, not photograph. I just blindly presumed that snowless winter just wouldn’t lend itself to photography in a park. 

Boy, was I wrong. This park has a woods of considerable acreage, and as I found out, its winter “look” is most definitely photogenic.

On this day, the compositions just kept jumping out at me. Such as the silhouette you see leading off the post. This presented itself on a lark; I happened to turn around on the walking trail to look back at that odd-shaped tree trunk, and lo and behold ... it gifted me a silhouette. 

Moments earlier, approaching it from the other side, I certainly saw the odd shape, but I’d come across it before while walking the trail, and I had photographed it. So it was not new. But I’d never seen it in this backlit form. For those of you who haven’t seen it in a previous post, I present it below in normal exposure. 

I was shooting in the same general direction when I took the gnarly branched tree trunk in the first two photos below, so the slight backlight make the tree trunk itself dark (as in the first photo). In post processing, I boosted shadow detail as show in the second photo below. Below that are a few other tree oddities I came across walking the trail.  

Another oddity I came across — and which apparently had not jumped out at me previously — were these grassy mounds (first five photos below) on either side of the loop portion of the trail. In summer, these areas are green grasses and foliage. The converted yellow-orange mounds of late autumn and winter are what caught my eye.

The next area of interest I ran into were striking streaks of shadows. The first five photos below are among those I captured. 

Woven into the landscape in areas where there were no off-season yellow mounds were clusters of green vegetation with elongated leaves, illustrated in the first five photos below. 

And then there were the trees where yellow or bright brown leaves still clung to the branches, presenting striking vistas when surrounded by many other deciduous trees bereft of their leaves. 

Then there were the oddities on the ground — the tree roots, rotted trunks or fallen branches forming unusual shapes: 

Next, the landscape itself ... starting with the tall, still green trees towering over a mini-shelter on a pedestrian bridge (first two photos below), tall bare trees lining the forest (next two photos), a couple of tree greens on the landscape (next two photos) and a rectangular show of sunlight along a path backed by more tall lumber. 

To view a full gallery of photos from this shoot, follow the link in this sentence.

Then we return to the pond and/or forest stream, where rippling reflections, geese and ducks, and tree shadows on water caught the eye.