Caddo Lake Bald Cypress Reflection Photography

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Caddo Lake Reflection

Mirror of the Swamp: Finding New Angles on Caddo Lake

The Art of Returning

You’ve heard me rave about Caddo Lake before. The past two years I’ve gone there the first week of November to catch Fall colors of the bald Cypress trees that grow out of the shallow lake. My first year I was just mesmerized by the colors, the draped Spanish moss—hanging like tattered velvet curtains from every branch—and all the wildlife. Then last year on my trip I spent more time trying to get more unique but still compelling photos of this place. That’s where I came up with this wonderful reflection photograph. I’m not sure if I’ll go back again or not, but it has been one of my top two or three favorite places to go in Texas.

One thing I have learned doing photography for 45 years is just to keep returning to the same location over and over again, either at the same time or different seasons of the year, because conditions will always be different as well as your mindset, and you will always come away with different and unique images that did not reveal themselves on prior visits.

That’s the philosophy I used when I lived in California. I returned to Death Valley year after year, always getting great photos of different places or even the same places under different light. So, what I’m trying to say is don’t just discount a place and not go to it because you’ve been there before, because you will see it with different eyes every time you go. On this particular morning, instead of looking up at the towering canopy, I pointed my lens down at the water's edge, letting the dark, tannin-stained surface turn the massive flared base of the cypress into an abstract mirror of bronze and charcoal tones.

The Secrets of Caddo Lake's Ancient Waters

Caddo Lake sits nestled on the border between Texas and Louisiana, and it holds a storied place in regional geography and folklore. Spanning around 26,000 acres, it is named after the Native American Caddo people who lived along its shores before being displaced. Geological history records that the lake was formed largely by the Great Raft, a massive log jam on the Red River that blocked water flow and backed it up into a vast labyrinth of bayous, sloughs, and wetlands.

Ecologically, the star of the show is the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum), a deciduous conifer that defies typical tree behavior by dropping its needles in the winter after turning a brilliant copper-orange in November. Those iconic "knees" sticking up out of the water help the root system breathe in the oxygen-poor swamp mud, and the heavy drapes of Spanish moss—which isn't moss at all, but a flowering epiphyte related to pineapples—add that signature, haunting atmosphere. Photographing these waters requires patience, a tolerance for humidity, and a willingness to look past the obvious postcard shots to find the quiet geometry hidden right beneath the surface.

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