The image above appears in a juried competition called "The Contaminated Landscape" at the 136-1/2 Gallery in Manchester, CT near Hartford.  The exhibit, which also includes another of my photographs, runs from May 24 through June 19, 2014.  The photographs were both shot soon after sunrise at a sand pit not far from where I live. This was some years ago, and I was taking a graduate course in landscape photography at Connecticut's Wesleyan Universty.  The assignment was to photograph a landscape that had been damaged by human action.  The abandoned sand pit, located just north of a torunament golf course, was strewn with derelict cars and old tires.  The terrain was badly eroded, with deep gullies carved into the earth and choked with weeds.  And yet I came away having learned a counterintuitive lesson: when seen in a certain light, even the most ravaged landscape can be beautiful.