Posts Tagged ‘landscape’
American Falls in warm light
Whether you call it late afternoon or early evening, the warm light near 7PM on July 25th enhanced Niagara’s American Falls. The dark area across the upper right is the embankment on the Canadian side of the Niagara River that we’d visited earlier in the day. I’ve added another view as a reminder of the way different vantage points and compositions change the feel of a scene. The black specks in the second image are distant birds.
© 2019 Steven Schwartzman
Dawn
Channeling my inner Steve Gingold, on the morning of September 4th I left home while it was still dark outside and drove to Mills Pond in Wells Branch to see what dawn might bring. The sunrise was pleasant, even if not as dramatic as what we’re used to seeing from Massachusetts. In part that’s intrinsic: Austin isn’t known for great sunrises and sunsets the way some parts of the country are. The fact that the pond is on the prairie and surrounded by a neighborhood means a photographer has no chance to get up high for a broad view that includes only natural scenery. Confronting those drawbacks, I went for a silhouetted sunrise.
© 2019 Steven Schwartzman
Rainbow Falls
You’ve already seen that at Watkins Glen State Park in New York State’s Finger Lakes region a visitor can walk behind Cavern Cascade. Upstream at Rainbow Falls comes another (and somewhat wetter) chance to do that:
From behind the curtain of water I experimented with a slow shutter speed, namely 1/15 of a second.
And below, sans animation or slow motion, is a more ample view showing the round pools the falling water sustained. In the previous waterfall picture from Watkins Glen I felt fortunate to have one disembodied tree trunk or limb that had ended up in the gorge; here I got three.
© 2019 Steven Schwartzman
Dead tree trunks and limbs at Watkins Glen
Here’s a view taken at 1/15 of a second showing a waterfall in Watkins Glen State Park in New York’s Finger Lakes region on July 30th. The photographer in me was happy that the dead tree trunk had lodged where you see it in spite of the force of the falling water.
Smaller and whiter dead tree limbs also attracted me.
They played off the rock strata in the gorge and contrasted with the living plants around them.
Even before I’d seen any water at Watkins Glen, falling or otherwise, the shadows on a broken but still standing tree trunk along the trail from the parking lot to the gorge caught my attention:
© 2019 Steven Schwartzman
Navarre Beach
On the way from Atlanta to Mobile on August 9th we deviated from the most direct route to stop at Navarre Beach on the Gulf of Mexico in the Florida Panhandle. The dark clouds beyond the sea oats (Uniola paniculata) foreshadowed the downpour that hit us west of Pensacola an hour or so later.
© 2019 Steven Schwartzman
Other waterfalls at Treman State Park
While Lucifer Falls is the best known waterfall in the upper part of Treman State Park, others there also deserve attention. In the first photograph, though no direct sunlight had yet reached these falls on the morning of August 1st, reflected light from near by added yellow to the pool at the base of the waterfall. In some of my photographs I zoomed in to minimize or exclude that trespassing sunlight:
Here’s a different waterfall altogether, the most channelized I saw there:
And here’s a downward and more abstract view of a waterfall:
I used a shutter speed of 1/800 of a second for the third photograph and 1/1000 for the others.
Speedy me, or at least speedy my camera’s shutter.
© 2019 Steven Schwartzman
