Monday, September 7, 2026
The timing on this blog is a little off for me just so you know. I’m actually typing it out on the day that I completed the trek, but I’m going to wait until Tuesday morning to publish it because I already had a blog published early this morning which was the second part of a trek from Sunday. In all actuality, I really don’t need to be going out and doing photos right now as I need to be focusing on my upcoming branding session for a client in Winston Salem. I’m having to work out the lighting in my mind while not really knowing what I will have as far as ambient light in the recording studio. I do know that I will be mixing ambient with my own lighting to keep the feel of the place accurate. This will create some issues that will have to be dealt with, and I’ll have to do it in a very small space, so I’ll be very limited in the lighting that I can bring. I have added another LED light to the mix and plan on using two of those for lighting as they don’t take up that much space, and will allow me to match light levels a little easier than with my strobes.
Anyway, you can tell that I have been working on that for a while now and have gotten pretty well prepared for the session. It just so happens that the weather over the weekend was fantastic, at least for me. I know that most folks didn’t enjoy spending a holiday weekend under cloudy skies and dodging storms every day. For a photographer, these are pretty good conditions and work well for all types of photography. As I mentioned in the closing of my last blog, I was thinking about going to do some waterfall photography since the clouds were looking pretty good for Monday and once the rain cleared out in the morning, I should have an easy time of it. With the recent rainfall, I was looking forward to doing some work with waterfalls after a full summer of drought conditions which tend to make waterfalls a little less….well watery.
The waterfall I had in mind was Elk River Falls in Avery County which I haven’t been to in quite a number of years. It isn’t a waterfall that I particularly enjoy because it is just kind of there with very little personality. At least that is the problem with it when viewed from the bottom of the waterfall. For me, the best aspects of this waterfall are at the top of the falls which is actually easier to get to than the base of it. This is where the character of the falls lies, at least in my opinion.
I had wanted to visit here late last year but found out that it was still closed off due to the damage from Helene, but that was all cleared up by the Waterfall Keepers of NC earlier this year I believe. It has been on my list for places to go since then, but I wasn’t really looking to go there with limited water flow during the drought. Now that we have had about two months of regular rains, I figured that the water tables were back up to where they needed to be and I was betting that it was looking normal by now. With the forecast calling for a layer of low clouds after the rains past, I knew that this was the time to go there and give it a try.
The cloud level is important because in order to photograph the entire waterfall, I have to get the sky into the shot at the top of the waterfall. I’ve heard this called the triangle of doom for photographers because if you aren’t careful this area above a waterfall will expose as a blank white void in the composition. With low clouds, I knew that I would have a chance at some texture to the clouds and therefore some visual interest in that triangle of doom. This is a difficult waterfall in terms of exposure as well because of how it is positioned. If the sun is out at all, there are awkward shadows that will fall over most of the scene which leaves some very bright highlights on other portions of the composition. If I was lucky, I would get out there with some good cloud cover for diffused light and have the clouds showing some detail. It was a big ask, but that is what I do as a photographer.
As I was going to sleep around midnight on Sunday after finishing the second blog, I checked the weather. The storms in the area were supposed to be rolling through until about 11am and the clouds were going to hang around till roughly 2pm before giving way to partly cloudy skies. That would give me plenty of time to work the falls under clouds, but hopefully staying dry. When I woke up this morning at a little before 8am, I checked the weather again. It was raining outside the window, but the forecast was showing just clouds over Elk River Falls and those clouds were going to be breaking up around 10am. That kind of changed my plans a great deal.
It was going to take me a bit over an hour to get to the falls, and that was really pushing it since I hadn’t even planned on getting out there until 11am or so. I checked the cloud coverage, and it was looking like around 75% after 10am which wasn’t too bad actually. That should still give me good light and plenty of interest in the cloud cover over the falls. The decision was made to go ahead and grab something to eat real quick and head out to give it a try.
The very interesting thing about this trek was that it actually made me think quite a bit. What was I thinking about you ask? Well, I was thinking about the fact that I was once primarily a landscape photographer, and I actually lived for photographing waterfalls. I enjoyed the adventure behind it with the planning and the traveling. I enjoyed the serenity of the landscape and that was actually what brought me to doing landscapes in the first place. I needed that break from police work and something to calm my mind. When I was getting started in 2005 getting out in the woods and hiking was a great escape from all the drama that I was seeing on a daily basis. It was my time to reconnect with what was good in the world. I found that for the most part, I was alone on the trails and would only occasionally run into other hikers. This trend continued for the next decade or more and I always found my landscape photography to be very relaxing.
Of course, I was transitioning into doing the decay photography in the early teens, but it was more or less something that I did in the winter to keep my skills up to date. I found the decay work to be a bit more stressful and actually more dangerous since I ran into folks pointing guns at me more often than I care to think about. I was always happy when I could just sit back and enjoy a stroll through the woods looking for interesting scenes to photograph.
I hate to say the “C” word, but there was a certain pandemic that happened in 2020 which changed a lot of what I loved about landscapes. You probably remember that we were all on lockdown, working from home, social distancing, and wearing chin diapers…I mean masks. We were encouraged to get out in the open air and go to parks and hike or just be outside in the fresh air. This was a push to avoid the health risks of being locked up inside with only a TV or a game console to entertain you. Well, folks started to get outside just like they were instructed to do. I started to see the results of that while visiting the Blue Ridge Parkway to do landscape photos.
How I was going about my photography was the same as it has always been. I get up early on those days when the weather looks promising and would head out for sunrise. Then I would wander around looking for other scenes that would work out for me. I was starting to see a difference by the summer of 2020 with way more people visiting the Parkway and doing outside activities. This trend kept getting more traction and eventually, I wasn’t able to find parking at Stone Mountain State Park and would run into other hikers all over Hanging Rock State Park. The longer the lockdowns lasted, the more people I saw getting outside. I guess it was great to see folks doing healthy activities, but I wasn’t used to this kind of traffic in the places that I like to photograph.
I remember the first time that I visited Elk River Falls. I’m not exactly sure what year it was, but I know I went with my old Sony camera, so it was before 2008. The parking lot was a small teardrop turnaround that was mostly grown over from lack of use. I was the only one out there during the time that I was there and saw nobody else at all on the trail. The next couple of times that I went, I might have seen a couple of other cars and ran into a hiker or two on the trails. It was never anything that even entered my mind. I just knew that I would usually be alone out there and that was just how I liked it.
This was the first time that I have been here since Helene and something that I noticed immediately was that there was a lot more parking leading to the teardrop. What could once hold maybe six cars was now able to hold as many as 25 or more. I could have counted because when I arrived at the falls, I found pretty much every space filled with a car. This was completely alien to me, and I wasn’t sure what to think. I was hoping that these were all belonging to folks fishing in the stream and not at the waterfall. Well, that thought was quickly dashed when I had to wait to start the steps to the trail for a group coming down the stairs and another one waiting until they cleared before they started up the stairs. There was a logjam of hikers that I had never experienced here before.
The clouds were still looking decent and the rain which had been falling on me the entire trip to the falls was starting to ease up. The hike was quick and I arrived at the top of the falls which I find to be the nicer area to photograph. I wasn’t the only one that enjoyed this section of the falls as there were about a half-dozen people already standing at the top of the falls taking selfies. I had to wait my turn to be able to get a spot to work in. Of course, while waiting my turn the rain stopped and the sun came out. I looked up and what had been a solid overcast was now showing blue sky in a good portion of what was above us. This was not going well at all.
In fact, I had time to think about how stressful landscape photography has become over the years. Since 2020, I’ve seen an increase in visitors to the lesser-known parks that I once loved to visit. It seems like everyone wants to get out and come to the parks which is great in a way. However, I do miss the time when everyone would choose to remain at home leaving the landscape all to me. It is selfish I know, but I got spoiled for more than a decade being able to visit all the locations that I wanted to without having to worry about other people.
A curious observation was that all of the signs indicating the dangers with this waterfall had been swept off the ledge of the falls and I saw no remnants of them anywhere. They used to be plastered all over warning of the deaths that had occurred at this location. All those warnings had been placed and very few people visited to see them. Now that there was standing room only at the top of the waterfall, the warning signs were nowhere to be seen.
I wasn’t having any fun at all and was having a hard time finding a composition to get started with. There was no way that I could just connect with the waterfall and listen to it which is how I usually choose to work through the compositions that I use. When it was my turn, I quickly built the camera with my 24-70mm lens and started to pick out the obvious composition. It wasn’t as carefully crafted as I would have liked, but it was something to get started at least. I started to move through the different framings and found a couple of ways of framing this top section of the waterfall.
The problem was that waterfalls are much easier to photograph looking upstream from the flow of the water. Here, I was forced to work with a profile of the waterfall so there wasn’t as much depth to the scene. I tried several different spots, but none of them really sang to me. The waterflow was great and I was thankful that I had come out on this day because it was about perfect to look at. The idea that kept me up here was the fact that I knew that photographing this waterfall from the lower area was not easy and the flow of the water wasn’t really all that interesting to me as it was just a simple drop with little to no cascading action.
Not wanting to hog the waterfall, I chose to move back and let others get in close to it. Because of the increased distance, I switched over to my telephoto lens as I was going to start working isolations and some abstract compositions of the moving water. This worked out a bit better as I was on a more stable footing at the distance. The first composition that I shot with the long lens was one that was very similar to what I had done with the standard zoom that I had started with. It was framed slightly different though which prompted me to flip in horizontally in post for a better visual flow to it. I also chose to do this one in black and white because the textures were what interested me with this particular frame.
That was when another thought crossed my mind and one that I found quite interesting. It seems that there are two different approaches to photography. The first is the one that I think everyone starts out with. You take a photo of something. That is it, you are actually photographing a subject and what it is. That was what I was doing here. I was photographing the upper portion of the waterfall. There is nothing at all wrong with this approach to photography, but I think that it becomes boring after a while. The other camp of photography is where you photograph what the subject means to you. This has nothing at all to do with what the subject is, rather it is a matter of how the subject makes you feel. You find a way to photograph the essence of it.
I’ve been doing photography in this way for years now. Sure, I’ll get the establishing shot when I can, but I really enjoy getting into the details that strike me as interesting within the subject. The trap with landscape photography is that we are all predisposed to capture the scene as a whole rather than the details. The scene as a whole could be a single tree, it doesn’t have to be a full grand landscape. In the situation of this waterfall, the scene I was capturing was the moving water and the overall shape of the waterfall. I was capturing the postcard shots and while those are important, they are not all that fulfilling to me. That is especially true when I am working a scene that I have photographed before. I’ve captured this waterfall probably three times over the last couple of decades. It hasn’t really changed all that much, so I was rehashing things that I have done before.
I needed to rethink my motivation and start to photograph how this waterfall made me feel and really dig into the essence of it. I assume that with most waterfall photographers, it is the motion of the water which becomes the essence that we are looking to capture. I didn’t need to include the banks of the stream as it arrived at the drop. I didn’t need to include the other hikers that were gathered on that same rocky shore. It was the water that motivated me, and that was what I intended to capture, and I wanted to do it in an abstract way.
From my safe space away from the water and the crowds, I started to pick out the area that most interested me with the water flowing. Ironically, it was a section of the water that was kind of far from the actual drop of the falls. It was an area that I was having a hard time including in the compositions of the entire waterfall, but at the same time I felt that this was a defining detail for the entire falls. With that in mind, I started to really work a composition around the way that the water was flowing over the rocks. I could see this as being a black and white as well as a color image. It was the first time that I had truly been excited about being here. The shapes that I was capturing really spoke to my heart and I loved the abstract nature of it. I shot a bunch of frames with slightly different framings so that I had plenty of different options to look at when I got back home.
As I was shooting these, the sun kept getting brighter and brighter, but I was very lucky that the area that I was working with was in the shade. There were no hotspots and no heavy contrasts to work with. It was as good as if it were a cloudy day and I was very thankful for that. What light there was happened to be really diffused but still added to the saturation of the scene. There was a lot of green undertones to the water from the moss that was growing under the water. I assume that the moss is there from when things are dry and just hangs on for dear life when the falls are flowing. Whatever brought the moss to this section, I was happy that it was here for the added colors it brought to the scene.
I tried to work with other areas of the water but just kept coming back to this same spot over and over. I ended up capturing nine different exposures from this same spot even though I was thinking I was getting different areas. I guess that is the only proof that I needed that this was, in fact, the essence of the waterfall for me. Now, what is really interesting is that while going back to count through the different frames, I had to pause on the last one that I had shot. It was a little wider than the others and included some of the orange bank in the upper left corner. It had made it through the first round of culling but had been eliminated after that. Now that I was looking at it once again, my mind was willing to be changed.
The original frame had been done as a 16:9 aspect ratio in the camera which had eliminated the bank in favor of more information on the sides. Now that I was looking at it again, I wanted to change the aspect ratio. I had already done one in 16:10 as well as one in the native 3:2 which gave different impacts for both. I liked this one as a 3:2, but the orange bank didn’t really make sense in that format. This wasn’t a surprise because the original photo was composed without me seeing the bank. Now, that I had spent some time with the colors, I really liked the idea of having the splash of orange in the frame to go along with the green tones of the water. I just needed to find a way of making it happen that didn’t look accidental. The aspect ratio was the key once again and I found that for this one, a square crop worked fantastic. It actually really pulled the eyes into the scene in a way that the other two just did not.
The feeling behind the square crop was a bit more relaxed and calming than the others which had a distinct landscape orientation which accentuated the flow of the water through the frame. In the black and white photo which was in the 16:10 aspect ratio, I had flipped it horizontally so that it read better for how the tones were presented. This gave another variation on the same scene. Now that I was looking at a square crop of the scene, I was seeing yet another variation on the scene that said completey different things.
I was able to do all of this while folks were just rotating through taking their selfies completely oblivious to me even being there. I kept waiting for someone to ask me to take their photo which seems to always happen in locations like this, but I don’t think that anyone even knew that I was there. All the better for me as it allowed me time to try and settle into a rhythm with the water.
Finding a common ground with the landscape is the best way to capture it from what I’ve learned. I have to connect with the location and the scene in order to really and truly capture it with the camera. I was having a very hard time with that today and it was showing with the photos that I was taking. When I am overstimulated, I tend to look for the details in a scene to visually simplify what I am taking in. I was doing that with this waterfall in a very obvious way. There was just too much noise around for me. That noise took many different forms from other conversations going on around me to just the noise of being aware of all the people around me. There were probably 50 or more people in the park between this upper section and the lower section which I think is now the beach. There were many sunbathers on the “beach” laid out and embracing the sun. Yeah, that sun which just appeared a few minutes earlier. I’m still not sure how there were this many people wanting to be here in the rain that was just finishing when I arrived.
Speaking of the noises that were distracting me and keeping me from connecting with the waterfall, I’m really trying hard to remember hearing the actual waterfall. This is a sound that is usually deafening to me and blocks all other sounds when I am working with a waterfall. I remember hearing it when I was on the trail hiking in, but once I started to work with the waterfall, those sounds faded out and were replaced by the din of activity around it.
This prompted another line of thinking which brought me back to a blog entry that a friend of mine had posted not too long ago. I’ve talked about Bob many times before, and you may remember that he is a waterfall photographer though his current home of Colombia, SC, prevents him from doing much in the way of waterfalls these days. However, he is making a point to get back into nature to reconnect with it as that is his “church” and where he recharges his own batteries. He always feels refreshed after a hike in the woods and experiencing nature and the rushing water of all his favorite waterfalls. I’ll admit, I was standing there at the top of Elk River Falls and was feeling very jealous of Bob. I knew the connection that he was taking about and I was missing it. It has actually been quite a while since I’ve really experienced that kind of soothing embrace from nature. It seems that every time I try to get out and enjoy a landscape, it is just too peoply for me. I was being robbed of my chance to recharge in the landscape because of all the people that were here.
I compared it to standing out in the drizzle to photograph the old Jonesville Motor Company building as well as the old Ford N series truck that followed. These were both kind of rushed as I didn’t want to overstay my welcome at either location. I was battling drizzle during both sessions and had ended up rushing out earlier in the day than I had planned for. Still, both of those locations were relaxing and very calming for my own mental state. Both of these locations were just random spots along a state road and the subjects were probably considered eyesores by those who passed them by. Yet, I was seeing the beauty in both subjects and was really enjoying photographing them both. That contrasted greatly with standing here working on photos of a waterfall which is probably universally associated with being a beautiful natural phenomenon. Books have been written about waterfalls and tons of folks have photos of them adorning their walls. The experience here at the waterfall was a big letdown for me and I found myself missing the quiet beauty of the decay subjects that I had just photographed.
Was I in the wrong line of photography when it came to my landscape photos? Should I just go ahead and drop the landscape part and just go with “decay photographer?” Yeah, this trek to Elk River Falls really had me wondering about things. Landscape photography used to be something that just felt like a natural fit for me, but now things had changed and I wasn’t sure that it was a change for the better. Now, don’t worry, I’m not digging myself into a creative slump or depression. I’m just thinking out loud now that I was faced with this current situation that seemed to represent the culmination of all that I had been thinking about landscape photography for a while now.
I was there at the top of the waterfall packing up my gear and wondering if it was even worthwhile to go down to the “beach” and see about getting an overall composition of the waterfall. My gut was telling me that there was no real point. The sun was now pretty bright and was causing some pretty deep shadows from what I could tell. There was also the matter that I would probably be in the way of everyone else moving around the area. It would probably just put me in more of a negative frame of mind than I already was in. However, it was hard not to consider the long drive to get out here when I was just a short hike to the base of the falls. Even if I didn’t get my camera out, it had to be worth it to go down there and look at it in person once again.
More out of a sense of convenience for already being here, I continued the hike down the hill to the “beach” and started to look at all of the people that were there. Most of them were all situated for being there for a while. It really did look like an oceanside setting without the umbrellas. I wasn’t going to be able to get out on the furthest point of the beach like I would have normally done. This is where I have photographed the falls many times before and have done it as a panorama as well as a single frame capture. I’ve done really long exposures here as well as faster ones depending on the lighting. I wasn’t really thinking that I needed to bring the camera out at this point. The sun was casting shadows over the scene, I wasn’t able to get where I wanted to be, and let’s face it, this still isn’t a particularly pretty waterfall in my opinion.
However, I did find myself looking at the falls from the edge of the beach. I’m not sure if I have ever considered photographing it from here before, but I know that I have dismissed it at least a couple of times because of the huge boulder that appears on the right side of the scene. Previously, I had always wanted to capture a full view of the waterfall and had seen the body of water in the basin as a large area of negative space. It was still rather empty with the exception of the water bubbles that were floating around. If I were to include the large boulder to the right, I was going to have to include a lot of that empty water which didn’t seem all that smart to do. There was no reason to pull the camera out, the lighting was terrible and I wasn’t really liking what I was seeing from the area that I could actually work from.
Since I was here though, I pulled out my phone and started to look through the camera to see what the composition might look like. Sure enough, a wide view of the area seemed to work well and including the boulder to the right worked as a foreground. The water was showing the shadows and highlights from the sunlight and that kind of filled up the negative space with some visual interest that also gave depth to the scene. It was better than I had thought that it could be and was good enough to pull the camera out.
I went ahead and attached the wide-angle lens and a polarizer to get started. I worked on finding the right place that gave the angle that I wanted. The angle was important because it established the distance between the boulder and the waterfall. Too far and they wouldn’t appear connected in the photo and if they were too close, the waterfall would be crowded when it needed room to breathe, especially since it was in the shadows. Once I had the composition worked out, I made a test exposure and found that the triangle of doom above the falls was overexposing way too much. I had to back the exposure down by about a stop which put the whole left side of the frame into shadows. According to the histogram, I was going to have a hard time getting the details out of the wall on the left and even the waterfall was getting lost in the scene. The lighting was just not all that good.
As the clouds moved over the sun, the light changed across the scene, and I would get new exposures to see if that worked out any better. The sky was pretty much a constant so when the clouds blocked the sun, everything went dark in the landscape, so that wasn’t going to work. I was about to give up but as I was looking at the image review, I had an idea that just might work.
Looking at how the sun was falling on the scene, I found that there was a roughly straight line that bisected the image into a left side with the waterfall and a right side with the rocky face. The right side was getting the majority of the sun while the left side was largely in shadow. I pulled out a 2-stop ND Grad filter and slid it into the filter holder. I then rotated that holder 90° to the right and then corrected the polarizer. Essentially, I was using the grad filter for the right half of the frame to control the sunlight while keeping more exposure on the shaded portion. The soft transition would make the effect harder to notice and would allow the center of the frame to remain a bit brighter. I shot a couple of fresh exposures here and found that the idea was solid and I wasn’t able to see the division line in exposures, but the sky was still overcooked. I needed a bit more intervention so I swapped that filter out for a 3-stop version and slid it into the same place. That worked quite a bit better and I finished the series out with that filter in place.
It was a matter of waiting for the sunlight to hit at this point which lit up the right bank allowing the grad filter to work there and with the sky while the shaded portion was left without any filter effect. It was working well and the only problem that I had was a young boy that insisted on standing in the water wearing neon trunks right at the lower left of my frame. He wasn’t moving so I wondered if he was just going to stand there for the duration rather than moving or swimming. He must have remained there for five minutes before he started to gradually move off to the left. Once he was out of the frame, I went back to grabbing different exposures.
When I was all finished with this composition, I had captured a total of 17 frames between the three filters and all the different variations of lighting that went across the scene. I really hadn’t realized that I had spent this much time on the scene, but it became very obvious when I was going through the culling. There were three of the photos that stood out as being the top choices and I decided to see how they worked after processing. The three choices were images 11, 13, and 17. I ended up processing number 11 as a full color image done in the native 3:2 aspect ratio. The last frame was done as a black and white in a 16:9 aspect ratio because the lighting was a bit more focused on the basin and the waterfall which meant that I didn’t need as much information at the top of the frame. Those were the two that I went with and originally inserted into this blog.
As I was going through the day and looking at the filmstrip of images that basically formed the timeline of what I did, I started to pay more attention to that 13th frame. Now the differences between these photos were minimal at best, one was pretty much like the others with the exception of the lighting. The 13th frame was very similar to the last frame with how the light was showing up in the water. I liked how that looked in the black and white image. I was also looking at the selected thumbnail for the blog entry over to my right while I was typing this out. It was the color image, number 11 which was being shows as a square format. I actually kind of liked how the composition looked as a square and hadn’t really considered that before. Now that I was considering it, I didn’t want to go and change the image that I had already fully processed. Instead, I went to that 13th frame which had made it through two rounds of culling but had never been processed.
The first thing that I did was to crop the image into a square frame and position that frame a bit more accurately than the thumbnail had done. Once I was happy with how the frame was applied, I started going through the familiar steps of processing the image. I went with a little more intense look than I had with the other color image because I didn’t have as much of the frame in shadows this way. The extra contrast and saturation added some interest that worked very well with the highlight in the basin. The more I worked with this image, the more I started to really like it. In fact, out of the three different versions of this composition, I think that the square format might be my favorite.
Just like that, I was looking at a composition that actually made a lot of sense for this waterfall. After doing it as a wide panorama and multiple different 3:2 compositions, I was seeing a rudimentary square format photo that really worked well with the scene. The key to the success was a combination of the boulder to the right and the way that the sunlight was falling on the scene. It was an intense photo, but calming at the same time. I really did like this one, and that was a huge revelation after having so many negative thoughts about landscape photography in general and this waterfall experience in particular. It didn’t really change my thinking, but I’m really happy that I went back and gave this one another look before I was all finished with the photos from the trek.
The time that I had been actively capturing images had been roughly 40 minutes from the first exposure to the last. In that time, I had captured a total of 46 frames. Of those, I ended up with nine keepers which isn’t too shabby at all. I had no interest in hanging around any longer because there were just more and more people coming down the trail the longer I stayed here. I was starting to be in the way of people walking down the beach and I was beginning to really worry that the camera was going to get knocked over. Not wanting to ruin such an expensive piece of kit due to an accident, I decided it was time to pack it all in and head back to the house. I had accomplished my mission for the day.
The hike out was a bit of an ordeal as I had to wait for the trails to clear before I could make it back to the parking area. It felt like a salmon swimming upstream in many respects. When I got back to the parking area, my truck was surrounded by other vehicles and there were probably a dozen people walking around which made it kind of hard to get out of the parking area. When I got to the bridge leading out, I had to wait for two other cars to come in before I had room to exit. I’m not sure if they were able to find parking as I think I might have cleared the only space available.
The drive through the neighborhood out to the main road had me passing some nice and rusted cars, but they were all jumbled in with other cars in spaces too tight to be able to work with. It did get me thinking about the differences between landscape and decay photography once again. After being around the crowds of people for the previous hour or so, I was looking longingly at the old cars that nobody seemed all that interested in. There were no crowds, no parking lot traffic jams, just cool old cars that still deserved some love.
I couldn’t help but think about how rare it was to find an old rusty car when I was shooting landscapes primarily. I’ve since learned how to look for them and can spot them behind houses very easily in most situations. They are quite literally all over and I have no problems finding them these days. I can even be selective about the ones that I want to photograph because there will aways be another one just around the corner. The thought of photographing an old car actually started to sooth me which was strange after coming from working with a waterfall. That was the thing that used to center me years ago and now I was pretty sure that my blood pressure was elevated after the experience.
As I continued driving, I was really wondering if I had wasted the trip out here since I hadn’t really gotten much enjoyment out of the day. Again, I was not going into a depression or anything like that, I was just evaluating what it would sound like to introduce myself as a “Decay Photographer” and dropping the landscape part. I can get dramatic and I recognize that about myself. It was food for thought. Had my time with landscapes run its course? I didn’t need an answer to that any time soon, but it was a question that I was interested in asking. This was the basis of the conversations that I was having with myself on the way back up the mountain.
Oddly enough, just a couple of miles outside of the park the clouds came back, and the rain started to fall again. This was kind of the world’s way of saying planning for a landscape trek is a waste of time. The forecasts will always be inaccurate even if it is just over a few acres where you need a certain kind of light. As I was looking at the wonderful waterfall lighting all around me, I couldn’t help but think about having to pull out the grad filters and using them sideways to control the light just a few miles back. I’m glad that I had the knowledge and filters to be able to do that which allowed me to salvage the whole trek. At the same time, I was still very frustrated with the entire experience. It would not have surprised me to come home and find that I had nothing at all workable on the memory cards and I was prepared to write this one off.
Before long I was in the community of Foscoe which I’ve driven through many times since I was in college. It has its own little rhythm and is unlike most small towns that I have been through. There are several different shops along the way which have a variety of cars in the parking lots, and there is one shop that I have always checked out which specializes in European cars. This time there was something that grabbed my attention and almost immediately pulled me out of my navel gazing monologue. What did I find you ask? Stick around and I’ll share what happened.
In the meantime, I’m happy that you joined me for this trek, and I hope that you have enjoyed the photos. Admittedly, they did turn out better than I had thought that they would. The one square crop of the full waterfall might just be my favorite from the time there which is very odd considering that it was set to be left on the cutting room floor. What are your thoughts as to favorites. I’m always interested to hear what others think about what I create and where the favorites fall. Of course, if you are in the market for some new wall art, don’t forget that I do offer prints of all my photos.
I’ll be back here again tomorrow with another chapter and one that is a bit more upbeat.
See you soon….
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