Falls on Full
Back about a month ago I posted an image of the Natural Bridge Falls, running at 200 CFS. Last night it finally went over 3,000 CFS and so today I headed back to get some shots of the water cresting the 105-foot cliff face. As this only happens for about a week each year, I wanted to make sure I was prepared…so the first thing I did was forget my tripod. Ersh… My buddy, Jay, was with me and I used his several times, so it worked out just fine and I’m very pleased with the shots. One interesting note is that the small stream of water flowing out to the left of the main body in this image is exiting from the same cave/hole visible directly above the flow in the upper-left of the photo I posted on May 7th to the Fine Art Photoblog. Everything visible in that image is hidden here, lost behind the mass of water spilling over the top – a truly amazing transformation.
I really like this shot. However, without the background information on the area that you provide and the sense of scale that the reference shot provides, a lot of the magnificence and uniqueness of the location is missing.
But then, that’s often the problem when photographing nature. It is so hard to get a 2D representation to have the scale of a 3D view.
Thanks for the feedback on this, Ramin, at the very least I’m glad to know that my commentary is a beneficial part of the process. By that I mean that so many photoblogs are single-image pages you click through with little or no text…which some people think takes away from the power of the picture as it stands on its own.
I fully understand about the scale, it’s plagued me from time to time on shots that should be more impressive, but lack a certain component. For the sake of ‘real world reference’, I decided to introduce a scaled element into this image. I took an icon of a man and woman and did the math so it represents 6′1″ or 185cm and stacked them top-to-bottom. It looks kind of funny, but it’s accurate…here, have a look.
Thanks. Based on the previous discussion I had a mental image of the scale. I needed to triple the mental image after seeing the overlay.
I’ve always liked some commentary on the images that I see. Especially when they are images of nature. The words and thoughts that a photographer decided to include with an image give added depth to the shot.
[...] a river and the Boulder runs a tight, fast course down some rugged mountains. If you look back at the previous post I mentioned above, you’ll see that the water comes over the edge and drops straight down, the [...]