13 May, 2011 Author: Glorianna Davenport

To a photographer, perspective is everything. Walking across the bogs, my eye is sometimes drawn the wide expanse -- earth and sky, horizon, and shape. At other times my eye focuses up close on an intense, often abstract composition -- in this case the pattern of iron in water. In colonial times many sites that later became cranberry bogs in Massachusetts provided a source of Iron ore (hematite). The fact that veins of iron ore exist so close to the earth's surface provides plausible evidence as to why iron was the earliest metal worked by man, and why it remained an important element for over 4,000 years.