Thursday, January 18, 2024
Two things need to be mentioned before I get rolling with this entry. First of all, one of my goals for this year is to do more black and white photography. There isn’t a particular reason for this other than I want to get better at seeing in a world without color. The second is When Toni and I first got together, she would join me on my treks rather often. Over time though, she realized that I have a hard time sharing the attention between her and my creative pursuits so she kind of stopped coming along. She didn’t stop quick enough to avoid the nickname “Photo Wench” though. She was always there to help spot compositions, be some company when things were slow, and occasionally drop a lens cap down a very tall waterfall. By the way, if anyone finds a Canon EF mount tail cap at the bottom of the Cascades at EB Jeffress Park, please let me know. Oh, and one more thing. After my last two treks, I have realized that I have a hard time stopping once I get in the flow of making images.
Now that we have some of the background out of the way, I can get into today’s trek. Yes, it is right on the heels of my last one, but with the clouds being few and far between for the next several days, I wanted to get out while I could. You might recall that I had wanted to come out to a waterfall in Yadkin County not too long ago after some rain. That didn’t work out at all because there was just too much water to make the types of photographs that I was after. I had kind of dismissed that idea as the days passed since I’ve been pretty heavy into photographing rust here lately. Looking at the weather last night, I noticed that the sky was going to be clear in the morning with increasing clouds later in the afternoon. That was a good setup for some photography, but I didn’t know what I wanted to shoot. My first idea was to go out to East Bend again to shoot the next property where I have contact information. The problem was, I had no idea what was on the property other than a collection of old rusty cars. Not knowing what I was in for, I chose not to go out there with only a few hours remaining in the day as I would surely fall into my reoccurring trap of shooting far too many photos. I really am trying to get more reasonable with how many photos I end up editing and sharing here in the blog. Really, I am!!
Feeling like the unknown location would probably be a bad choice, I thought about returning to the waterfall to see if that would work out. While we have had recent rains, the flood waters should have subsided by this point leaving a more normal flow, if not just a little bit swollen. Depending on the density of the clouds, this could work out, and since I’ve shot the waterfall many times in the past, I figured that it would be good for just a couple of new photos if I played my cards right. By playing my cards right, I am talking about limiting my choices while out there. Yep, I put some creative constraints on myself to make me really home in on what I wanted to capture and adjust my seeing.
As you have noticed with most of my recent photographs, I have been concentrating on shooting the details more and more. I’ve noticed that to the point that I am starting to understand the Robert Capa quote, “To make better photos, one should get closer to the subject and the action.” There are a couple of different ways of thinking about this quote, but currently I am really enjoying getting in close to really isolate what is interesting about whatever I am photographing. To that end, I made the decision that I was going to shoot isolations with the telephoto zoom and possibly the extender attached which would get me very close to the action. I needed the reach because unless the water levels are down significantly, there isn’t a good way of getting in close without hip waders. The other limitation that I chose to put on myself was to shoot in black and white which is a standing goal for myself this year. Those limitations were sure to pull down the photo count for the day which I was fine with. I mean, I’ve shot a lot of waterfalls, and this one specifically quite a few times.
When I woke up this morning, I checked on the weather which was still showing clear skies until about noon. At that point, there were some thin, high clouds moving in until about 2pm when some mid-level clouds would join in and hopefully diffuse the sun a good bit. I let Toni know that if the clouds chose to play nicely, I would be heading out in the early afternoon to go out to the waterfall. I also got in contact with one of my mentorship clients who has recently been introduced to long exposures to show motion as I thought this would be a good experience for him. Regrettably, he was unable to join me, but this is a location that we can return to any time.
I spent the morning in the studio working on my latest Behind the Camera which is almost finished now. Around 2pm I went upstairs to see what the sky was doing as the mid-level clouds were supposed to be coming in at this point. There was no texture, but the sky was overcast with just enough clouds to diffuse the light and kill any specularity in the highlights. According to my cloud app, Yadkin County was experiencing almost the exact same conditions as we were seeing here. With that in mind, I made my decision to go and give it a try, so I told Toni I was going to get changed and head out.
As I was getting appropriate clothes on for working around a waterfall, Toni came back and said that she was going to join me. I seriously thought it was a joke because the last time she joined me on a trek was back in the Spring and she spent most of the time sitting in the truck as I waited for the sun to set. Before that, it was probably years since she has been on a trek with me. In a very short amount of time, I realized that she was serious, and I loved the idea of her coming along with me. I just had to make sure that I kept all my lens caps safely away from her. With my trekking companion secured for the afternoon, we set out for Yadkin County which has become my favorite spot here recently for photos.
To this day, I still find it odd that there is a waterfall this far East in the State. It is a relatively unknown waterfall which makes it more exciting for me to photograph. By unknown, I am talking about those waterfall hunters that frequent areas like Transylvania County, and the rest of the Western NC mountains. There are hundreds of waterfalls out that way with different degrees of difficulty to get to. This waterfall is right on the side of the road, easy to get to, and has a lot of different personalities to it. It also goes by several different names. When I first photographed it, I had heard it referred to as Waterfall on North Deep Creek. Since then, I have heard it referred to as the Shore Styers Mill Waterfall, and most recently Shacktown Falls. I think I like Shacktown Falls the best for a name as it is short, sweet, and to the point…just like my Photo Wench.
The last time I had photographed this waterfall was in mid 2019, so it has been quite some time. This was a session where I chose to really focus on the unique colors that flood waters provided this waterfall. There is so much silt in the creek bed that when the water is rushing it turns chocolatey brown. This had been discovered a couple of years before that particular trek when I made some technicolor edits of the falls to really emphasize that fact. That same appearance had been the case when I checked the falls out recently and decided that there was too much water to really get what I was looking to photograph.
On the way out to the falls, I was worried that there would be too much water yet again for me to do what I wanted to do, and I really didn’t want the brown water this time. I was looking for a cleaner look to the cascades than the churned-up water would provide. I wasn’t too worried about it though because my goal was to just get a picture or two. I didn’t need perfect conditions, and I was pretty sure that no matter what I was faced with I was going to be able to get at least one solid photo. I also had to show off for Toni and do things a little quicker than normal, so she didn’t get cold and bored standing there. It was the perfect setup for a quick trek with quick edits and blogging after the fact.
When we arrived, I could see the falls from the parking lot which is one of the things that I do like about this location. The water was mostly brown, but there were some white areas at least. The water flow was high, but not nearly as high as I had seen it before, and worlds away from the levels I had seen it like a month before. The reduced water flow allowed for the rocks to be seen beneath the cascades which was going to be very much necessary for what I wanted to capture. Remember, I had already decided on the type of photos that I was going to be capturing down to the lens choice and editing path I was going to take. It was very fitting that Toni had joined me on this trek because she absolutely loves black and white photos. If nothing else, she would help keep me on track with my goal of skipping the color altogether.
I grabbed my gear, and we took the very quick walk down to the shoreline, although I had to slow my pace down a bit since Toni has short legs. Hey, she said it, not me. Once we got down to the area where I knew I could get the best view of the different parts of the falls, I started to look to see what interested me the most. I saw a couple of areas that stood out to me with some nice contrasts thanks to the rocks. I grounded my bag and started to set things up. I checked out the reach of my 70-200mm lens and found that it wasn’t going to get me as close as I wanted, so I added the extender which made the lens effectively a 140-400mm lens which worked out great. It did show me the need for my future RF zoom purchase of a 100-500mm when I do convert my landscape kit over to mirrorless at some point in the distant future. The extra reach would be very nice in this situation, and the better optical quality without the extender would be welcome as well. I’m in no rush though because my current setup is more than enough for most of my needs.
Once I had the lens situation figured out, it was all mounted to the tripod. As you can see, this was being documented by the Photo Wench while she was getting her own photos of the area. When everything was ready, I went out on the rocks to get a little closer to the falls and to get the angles that I was after for the different shots that I had planned. Yep, I knew about what I was wanting, or at least the areas of the waterfall that would work for what I was after. This is the benefit of returning to a location more than a few times. You end up getting very familiar with it, and when it comes to making creative choices, you are already half of the way there.
Things started rather slowly as I picked out compositions and started to dial in my shutter speed. You see, in my past visits, I had some different thoughts on what looked good as far as a shutter speed on moving water. I was regularly shooting at more than 2.5 seconds which did a great job at smoothing the water but erased much of the texture of the water at the same time. That is not to say that it was a “wrong” choice, as I still really like the photos that were shot like that. These days, I just prefer to show a bit more texture to the water, especially when it is moving very fast like it was today. It took me a while to get the shutter speed dialed in which turned out to be between 1/4 and 1/8 of a second depending on the composition. With that speed I was liking the flow of the water and felt that it was appropriate for the scenes I was wanting to shoot.
There was a problem though as I wasn’t really liking the photos. The compositions were decent, and the display of motion was what I was wanting, but there was something that wasn’t sitting right with me. As I looked at the first 20 or so images, I realized what it was. The brown water just wasn’t cutting it for me at all. Everything looked so murky and monochrome. Since I was wanting to do this session in black and white anyway, I decided to switch the camera into the black and white picture style. When that came up, I saw the contrasts that I had been after, and the scene started to come to life. The composition that I had been shooting looked so much more effective and I made a few tweaks to fully take advantage of the way black and white looked. With that, I was on my way.
It wasn’t until I started culling the images that I saw just how much difference it made to see the scene in black and white compared to seeing it in color. The initial frames which had been shot in color didn’t make the final culling cut when I made the conversion to black and white. They didn’t work in that space because I had not composed based on a lack of color. The following photos that were composed while seeing it in black and white were much more effective and those were the ones that I ended up choosing from. There were about 46 photos that followed once I changed the picture style, and my hit rate skyrocketed with that simple change.
Now that I was seeing in black and white, it was just a matter of picking out points of interest and then building a composition around that visual anchor. If this sounds familiar, it is the same pattern of thinking that I used for the isolation shots on the old rusty cars earlier this week. I really can’t stress it enough. There are certain little tricks that you can use when it comes to composition that will work no matter what you are photographing. You can’t get much more different than shooting waterfalls and old rusty cars, yet this trick works exactly the same for both of the subjects. This is one of the reasons that I ended up liking the black and white picture style so much because it allowed me to compose the image around either the water or the rocks rather than seeing how the colors factored in. With the colors in view, the visual weight kept shifting because the whiter water had more visual weight while the brown water receded in comparison. Without color, the cascading water was all white and carried a similar visual weight. This allowed me to compose based on contrast rather than color which was very helpful.
If you aren’t sure why I want to spend more time shooting black and white photos this year, this is one of the key reasons. Seeing in black and white takes practice, and while I think I am fairly proficient in it, I know that I have a long way to go because every year, the vast majority of my photos are in color, and they just don’t work in black and white. I need to get to a place where I can effectively see in both realms because I really do love a well done black and white image. There are so many benefits to shooting in this way, both from a photographer’s standpoint as well as from the audience’s point of view. Think about it, we see in color every day, and so much of what we see is old hat. When you see the same scene stripped of color, it becomes new and different which demands more of your attention. Isn’t that the goal of a photograph? We want you to spend time looking at our photos and thinking about them. We want you to see the details and consider every inch of the photo. When we shoot in color, your brain recognizes the visual clues, and you are left just looking at the subject with the composition becoming a limited concern.
As I worked more and more compositions, I couldn’t imagine this subject being photographed in any way other than in black and white. The brown water was confusing and made the whole scene look odd. As I say that I do vividly remember wanting to capture that brown water because it was so different, and I thought that it looked really cool. I still see the draw to that way of seeing, but in my maturity, I want the focus of these photos to be on the flow of the water as it defines the shapes of what is beneath. The crisp nature of the black and white suites this waterfall so well, and it takes all the distractions out of the picture so to speak.
In a way, I was hearing this waterfall loud and clear. It was telling me exactly how it wanted to be photographed and I found myself working on pure instinct as I picked out different compositions one after another. There are times when I am shooting that I don’t spend a lot of time on any particular composition because I am in a zone of sorts. It all comes together in a frame or two and I move on to the next composition. I was realizing that I was in that zone within about 15 minutes of getting started. Again, I had come out here only wanting a couple of photos and I was knocking them down like I was about to get a big stuffed teddy bear at the fair. There is no feeling quite like it when you become a vehicle for the creativity that is swelling up inside of you.
With everything operating on auto pilot for lack of a better description, I started to think about Toni who was with me. I could barely hear her for the roar of the water, but occasionally she would say something to me, and I would try to engage in conversation, but it was hard to do because my brain was operating faster than I could react. At some point, she started talking on the phone to our middle daughter, Lexi which kept her occupied which I was happy about. I hated to be ignoring her, but I didn’t want to lose the focus that I had found. It was still very nice to have her out there with me, and I hoped that it would help feed her creative energy since she had been pastelling for a bit before we left the house.
She will never admit it, but she is quite good with pastels, much better than I would be with anything involving paper and drawing instrument. After a very long time of not doing much with her pastels, she had done a scene that she had photographed while we were in Williamsburg, VA last week, which turned out amazingly great. She called it an abstract, but I could tell exactly what I was looking at as an entire piece. There was a colorful sky which matched the inspiration image, and she did a fantastic job of recreating the bare trees in the midground which had a combination of visible bare branches and a muddied blend of many levels of bare branches. It was easily the best picture she had done. I’m really hoping that some of my creative energy will spill over to her and keep her doing this more and more.
About 45 minutes or so into shooting, I reached that point where I knew that I was going to start recycling views because I had shot multiple compositions around the areas that interested me. It was time to pack it in, so I moved off the second rock that I had been shooting from and made one last look around the area to see if there was anything else that interested me. There was nothing else with the water, but there was a tree that caught my eye. It was an old tree that had become hollowed out which will likely mean that it won’t be here much longer. It wasn’t the hollowed-out part that really caught my eye, but the new tree inside of it. I thought that was the most amazing thing that I had ever seen before. Of course, Toni let me know that she had already seen it and photographed it. This makes sense because she loved tree photos long before I started to.
I loved this one, and in honor of Toni being with me on this trek, I had to do right by it. I chose to make an exception to my self-imposed limitation of shooting in black and white only by switching back to color. I really felt that color was important to the composition because the vibrant green of the new tree showed life against the very much desaturated shell of a trunk around it. I also considered changing my lens choice because I could get very close to the tree without a problem, so I didn’t need the reach of the extra-long telephoto lens. However, something that breeds creativity is limiting choices and I would not typically shoot this scene with such a long lens. It wouldn’t hurt anything to give it a try, so I got into a position where the lens would make sense and framed up a shot at 230mm. This gave me a beautifully blurred background which focused the attention right on the new tree inside of the old tree. I had to make several shots at different exposure settings to try and combat the breeze that was wanting to move the delicate branches. It all came together at f/9, 1/8 second, at ISO 500.
When I got all of the photos home and edited, this was the only photo in full color, but I remained true to my wish to keep myself limited to a single lens. Had I allowed myself to swap out to a different lens, I know without a shadow of a doubt, early on I would have gone to a wider angle and worked on a composition that included most, if not all of the waterfall. This very well might have happened before I found the key of switching the camera into a black and white picture style. Had that happened, I would have missed out on what I think are some of my best photos of this waterfall that I’ve ever made. When I say limiting yourself boosts your creativity, I’m here to tell you that it works. I was actually in a creative headspace coming into this session, but it was like a turbo engaged when I had to find a way to make that extra-long lens work for the scene. I was forced to see things in a different way, and I love what the result was.
It really was nice to get out and concentrate on photographing nature once again. I never forget about it, even when I am working so hard on my decay photography. What made this even better is that Toni joined me, even though I didn’t really spend a lot of time directly with her during the hour. She made the ride out there much nicer, and I do like sharing this part of my life with her when I can. I hope she joins me more in the future, as long as she stays away from my lens caps that is.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek and the photos that I came back with. Remember, the best way to enjoy any photograph is in the way intended by the photographer. In my case, my photos, while nice to look at online, are meant to be displayed in a physical form on the wall. All of my photographs are available as prints and you can order directly from this website, or you can contact me for special order prints on different media or larger sizes. If you don’t have the wall space, or the budget to afford a print, consider supporting my art by buying me a virtual cup of coffee by using the “Donate” button below. As I am not sponsored in any way, and this blog is not monetized, it is through print sales and now donations that keep the shop open in a manner of speaking.
Let me know if you are interested in a waterfall workshop as I have one that is great when scheduled in early December. We would talk about doing photos just like these, but at a location where we can have access to as many as seven waterfalls in one park. If you would rather get some one-on-one time with me at a specific waterfall, let me know. In addition to my advanced mentorship sessions, I offer hourly sessions on location where I custom build an educational experience just for you. I’m very serious about your photography education and will do everything that I can to help you achieve your goals along your journey. Give me a call or shoot me an email to discuss what your needs and expectations are so we can see if we are a good match. The consultations are always free with no commitments. Many times, I can address your questions during that consultation defeating the need for a mentorship session. The idea is, if I can help you, there is a good chance you will come back when a bigger issue presents itself. Let’s start that conversation and see what I can help you with.
Until next time….
