Picture number 2 is a special story. I'd like to hear about it.
Picture No. 2 was taken on a road in the Pepacton Watershed. Most of the land there is owned by the City of New York Department of Environmental Protection (even though it's ~ 150 miles north of the city), but this particular piece of land is still privately-owned by a very nice lady who gave me permission to photograph the culvert. I saw it while I was driving around the watershed looking for wintery-looking scenes to shoot.
The story is pretty simple. It's a culvert that froze up. I suspect that it was installed there by DEP because the land that it runs under appears to be owned by rednecks who have, among other things, an old school bus sitting on their land. I reckon that DEP preferred the water running
under that piece of land than
over it; and DEP gets to do pretty much whatever they want where water is concerned around here.
The culvert empties onto the nice lady's land, where it flows into a brook (the one in the other pictures) and meanders its way down the mountain to the reservoir.
I have a DEP access pass and vehicle pass, and I get to do pretty much whatever I want on DEP land -- even on land that's not technically open to the public, but which I need to enter upon to get a shot that I want. I simply stop by the nearest DEP police station and explain what I want to do. They don't care much for their
facilities being photographed, but other than that, they're pretty easy to deal with.
Today I actually had permission to shoot from a closed bridge well south of there, but it was too blasted cold. It wasn't just the temperature, but the fact that the old bridge was iced over. So I turned around and looked for other things to shoot.
-Rich
