The Story Behind "Threshold"

Some shots you plan. Others you earn.

Threshold was both.

The location

The lake sits in a valley ringed by forested hills — the kind of place that looks unremarkable in flat afternoon light. Nothing about it announces itself. There's a wooden dock that extends out from the bank, semicircular at the end, built for fishing or simply standing over the water. Functional. Unpretentious. I'd walked past it earlier in the day and noted the symmetry — the way the railing curved back on itself, the straight walkway leading out like a visual arrow — and thought: if the light cooperates, this works.

The light did not immediately cooperate.

The wait

I came back in the late afternoon and set up at the base of the dock walkway — as low as I could get without being in the water, shooting straight down the boards toward the lake. The position was deliberate. Standing at eye height loses the perspective entirely; the dock becomes a flat shape rather than a passage into the frame. Getting low and centered turns the walkway into a lead line that pulls the eye all the way to the horizon. That's the shot. Everything else — the hills, the sky, the water — organizes itself around that geometry.

For about forty minutes, the sky was grey and flat. Usable, but not the image I was waiting for. I stayed.

The window

Then the storm that had been building to the west started to move. The clouds thickened and shifted, and for roughly ten minutes the last of the sunset pushed up underneath them — that specific orange-to-violet burn you only get when there's weather in the air and the sun is almost gone. The water picked it up immediately. The lake went from dark blue to something between purple and rose, the hills dropped into silhouette, and the dock held its warm wood tone against all of it.

That contrast — the warmth of the structure against the cool drama of everything surrounding it — is what makes the image work. Neither element alone is enough. Together they create the tension the title is pointing at.

The position

I was standing maybe two metres from the start of the walkway, shooting at around knee height, lens level with the deck boards. Wide enough to hold the full width of the dock railing and both hillsides in a single frame, but not so wide that the dock shrinks into a small object at the centre. The framing took longer to settle than the exposure did. A few centimetres left or right and the symmetry breaks. A few centimetres higher and the perspective flattens. The position is the photograph as much as the light is.

Why it's called Threshold

A threshold is a boundary you stand at before committing to what's on the other side. The dock does that literally — it's a structure that takes you out over the water without letting you go further. But the moment itself felt like one too. The pause before the storm arrived fully. The last of the light before dark. The stillness that precedes change.

That's what I was after. And that's what I think it holds.

Threshold is available as a limited edition fine art print at The Still Poet. Once the edition closes, it won't be reprinted.