I am extremely grateful to Phaedra Brown and Stephen Hiltner at The New York Times for publishing my second drone photo essay “Vermont, Dressed in Snow” in The World Through A Lens series. This series focuses on making drone photos during Vermont’s snowy winters.
Although I love to photograph Vermont’s bucolic landscape with a drone, I equally like to aim my aerial camera at man-made structures below. Winter shadows make geometric patterns between solar panels, while pale winter sun highlights the doubled shape of a yellow playground structure. Monkey bars! From above, we see the patched cracks in a parking lot or the skid marks of a daredevil driver. Plants grow wild through the frame of an abandoned greenhouse, while a swimming pool covered in snow waits for summer. As new snow falls, it creates a clean painter’s canvas on which mundane shadows fall, creating fresh perspectives and new mysteries. Soaring above a snowy scene provides a brief sense of flight and discovery above Vermont’s landscape, bucolic and industrial.