Sunday, June 05, 2005
Fishing for Photos
I had some consulting work in Columbia this morning, so I decided to head out a little early and revisit a site where I had almost found some decent photo-opportunities a year ago.
This place is a small dam that forms Wilde Lake, the eponymous body of water that lends its name to one of Columbia's many neighborhoods. I knew that some mornings, there were blue herons visiting the face of the dam, and I was hoping to catch one, photographically speaking, today.
No such luck, but there was a family fishing at the creek below Wilde Lake, and at one point, I saw this young man climbing onto the stepped face of the dam. With my 70-300mm zoom mounted, I started snapping, and out of the several photos, I thought this one wasn't bad.
Boy Fishing on Dam - Columbia, MD
By the way, Wilde Lake holds a longtime family joke. Decades ago, I was driving my Mom and Dad to find a certain Chinese Restaurant that they had heard about in that neighborhood. I got a bit lost and stopped at a nearby gas station to ask for directions. Now, you have to realize that Columbia had what were at the time, um.... very unusual street names - you can spot a Columbia street name a mile away. For instance, Spotted Horse Lane and Rivulet Row. You definitely won't find a Main Street, Maple Lane or such.
Anyway, assuming that every place name in Columbia had an exotic origin, I asked the gas station attendant if he could direct me to "WIL-deh Lake." I assumed it was, maybe, of Afrikaans origin, and gave it a Yiddish-like pronounciation.
The gas station attendant looked at me as if I were a greenhorn and said, "do you mean Wild Lake?"
And so it turned out that the name, Wilde Lake was not as exotic as I thought it was - just standard land-developer's fancy-spelling.
But more than twenty-five years later, even those in our family who weren't born at the time still call it "WIL-deh Lake."
This place is a small dam that forms Wilde Lake, the eponymous body of water that lends its name to one of Columbia's many neighborhoods. I knew that some mornings, there were blue herons visiting the face of the dam, and I was hoping to catch one, photographically speaking, today.
No such luck, but there was a family fishing at the creek below Wilde Lake, and at one point, I saw this young man climbing onto the stepped face of the dam. With my 70-300mm zoom mounted, I started snapping, and out of the several photos, I thought this one wasn't bad.
Boy Fishing on Dam - Columbia, MD
By the way, Wilde Lake holds a longtime family joke. Decades ago, I was driving my Mom and Dad to find a certain Chinese Restaurant that they had heard about in that neighborhood. I got a bit lost and stopped at a nearby gas station to ask for directions. Now, you have to realize that Columbia had what were at the time, um.... very unusual street names - you can spot a Columbia street name a mile away. For instance, Spotted Horse Lane and Rivulet Row. You definitely won't find a Main Street, Maple Lane or such.
Anyway, assuming that every place name in Columbia had an exotic origin, I asked the gas station attendant if he could direct me to "WIL-deh Lake." I assumed it was, maybe, of Afrikaans origin, and gave it a Yiddish-like pronounciation.
The gas station attendant looked at me as if I were a greenhorn and said, "do you mean Wild Lake?"
And so it turned out that the name, Wilde Lake was not as exotic as I thought it was - just standard land-developer's fancy-spelling.
But more than twenty-five years later, even those in our family who weren't born at the time still call it "WIL-deh Lake."
