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Dan Baumbach
I was born in Brooklyn, NY, USA. As a teenager I became enamored with street photography. When I graduated from college I started working in commercial photography until other events pulled me in a different direction. About 20 years ago I got back into photography and now do macros and intimate landscapes.
The above is Maxwell Lake on a not atypical spring day in Boulder, Colorado. Here in Boulder, a small city and home to the University of Colorado, we’re only 45 minutes from Denver, one of the US’s fastest growing cities. Even better, we’re only 45 minutes from trails starting at 10,000 feet in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
However, oddly enough I find myself spending a lot of my photographic time here at Maxwell Lake.
Maxwell Lake is a small lake about a mile from where I live in North Boulder. It’s in a residential neighbourhood, but it’s surrounded by trees and has a little land around it, so it is possible to make photographs without any houses present. And if you’re like me, and looking down most of the time, the houses aren’t a problem.
Unless you want to do some snow-shoeing or cross country skiing, a lot of the Colorado High Country isn’t open for casual hiking till the summer, so I’m always looking for interesting places to photograph closer to home at only 5,000 feet.
I tend to look for more remote places than Maxwell Lake and there are plenty near Boulder, but I keep finding more and more to captivate me at this little lake and It’s not even a quarter of a mile around.
The trees here are always calling me—sometimes on foggy mornings. .
And sometimes on sunnier ones.
This last fall, I discovered how interesting the surrounding grasses look with reflections of the lake.
When it gets warmer, ducks and Canada geese hang out on the lake leaving feathers everywhere.
And, of course in the winter with its warming trends and cooling trends, the ice always creates interesting compositions.
I sometimes feel guilty. It's so easy to get to Maxwell Lake and I rarely go away disappointed. While I was photographing leaves, some young deer suddenly appeared for a morning drink. I quickly changed lenses to a zoom and grabbed this image. Then I went back to my leaves.
I’m told that mountain lions like to frequent the lake for drinks because it's right up against the foothills. I've never seen a mountain lion here, but I did see one around the block from where I live. But that’s for a different article.