go up!
I was at a familiar waterfall on this day, and I promised myself that I would not stand in the same old places and I would not take new variations on the same old pictures. What to do? On this day, go up. I might have climbed the rock wall at the back of the falls, but no. That would've required skills and pitons, neither of which I had. Kids might scramble up it, but not I.
But just around the corner from the vertical wall was a merely steep climb. Not very high, but a little awkward with a camera and tripod. Still, up I went. This image gives a sense of the perspective. Looking down, the water was just deep enough, just shallow enough, to create the remarkable triangular rock forms you see here. Fascinating! I stayed up on my perch for probably an hour, exploring different angles and different shutter speeds. (This one is at 2 1/2 seconds, f/11, ISO 50. Polarized, but not fully; I wanted that grey-blue color of the water against the brown-gold rock. Processed in Lightroom, but not overly so. Probably could've used a little more, but I held back.)
Often, when I know a shoot has come up short, I get home and don't download the photos from the camera for days. I know if disappointment is in store. In this case, however, I was in a hurry to see what the camera had seen. And in this case, I was not let down. The new perspective, the shapes, the colors, everything worked as I had hoped. And all this goodness came about because I wanted a new angle on a familiar scene. There's no sense here of the familiar waterfall. In fact, there's no sense that there's a waterfall here at all. But no loss. The new perspective more than made up for skipping the old familiar.
