Great Falls after the Hurricane

What happened at Great Falls after the Hurricane?

This is not a topic that qualifies under Urban Landscapes. Or does it? Thousands of people from the metropolis visit the Falls every month; it's the most spectacular piece of visual scenery in our neighbourhood, and a major source of recreation - walking, hiking, rock-climbing, kayaking and so on for city-dwellers.

An urban "escape" however, is not always an urban "landscape". Lamentations. I've nothing else to show for my last week's activity.

 I've visited the Falls after great storms and they never fail to impress. This time I visited on Friday, 2nd, and Saturday 3rd. I didn't go earlier in the week because I wasn't sure that the Rangers would open the Parks (on both sides of the river) or, even if they did, allow anyone close to river.

First stop very early Friday morning I went to the Maryland side. The Rangers had closed off access to Olmstead Island and so no viewing from the bridges was possible. From ground view it looked like this, first looking downriver from the right side of the first bridge, and then looking upriver from the left.

The Rangers can, on occasion give people a hard time for straying off the path. And with good reason  - I've seen people do some really stupid things on the rocks. They are dangerous and, when wet, very slippery. The Rangers generally leave photographers alone, though, if they see you are not getting too close to the water. One also gets buzzed by helicopters. Just wave to them.

I took pictures from both the perches shown above. Here are the first few I took ( the first from almost under the bridge).

They convey some of the force of the river, but one had to be there to hear the roar of the waters.  The first couple of pictures were at relatively slow shutter speeds - it was around 7 am, a little before sunrise. I then cranked up the ISO to shoot so as to get more detail of the assault of the water.

A while after I started taking pictures another photographer showed up. When, much later, we chatted it turned out he was a professional and shooting with an 8-10 stop neutral density filter which, of course, substantially reduced the amount of light entering his lens. To compensate, apart from opening the aperture he was, deliberately, of course, taking pictures at shutter speeds in seconds rather than hundreths of a second.  So here am I trying to avoid getting that fleece-like, silken look of flowing water, and there he is trying to capture it. Later on, of course, I reflected that I should have taken pictures with both fast and slow shutter speeds and see which came out more interestingly. I think I've learned - at least when I remember - to vary focal length or, at least, once in a while pull out my phone and consult  a depth-of-field calculator.  I think also I've learned to move my feet so as to get better compositions - so much so, that taking these pictures I slipped off the rocks and landed on my backside. (Fortunately, no damage, apart from a bruise or two.) Evidently though I've still to learn to vary the shutter speed. The pro-photographer has since sent me some of his pictures and I can't say I like them any better. I think that's fair enough; the energy, force and power of these furious rivers don't seem to lend themselves to a softening effect or at least so I think.

Moving over to the other side of the bridge:

To get the second and third shots one has to peer around some rock faces. I was able to take a whole series  of the water crashing on the rocks; these convey, I hope, some of that weight and momentum.. The resilience of some of the plants to this barrage is astonishing. The fourth shot is looking upriver through a telephoto lens and capturing a tributary which flows into the main river. In the past, this particular flow has seemed sedate and hardly threatening.

The following pictures show the sort of scrub one has to navigate to get to the river, and the rocks on which one has to stand; the third picture is of some high grass that is ubiquitous and lent itself to a soft-focus high key effect.

Barbara has once in a while spoken of photographing "tree-gestures" - a sort of anthropomorphism in which a tree appears to be showing or signalling some near-human action. As I was retracing my steps I saw this:

Looks to me like a Centaur imprisoned in a tree. The gods of the forest are still around. (In The Tempest wasn't Caliban freed from a tree by Prospero (where he had been imprisoned by his rather unpleasant witch mother)?)

Then - at about 11.30 in the morning - I hied over to the Virginia side, to see what the river looked like from that angle As most must know it is much more difficult to get close to the river on the Va side than it is on the Md side. this time I didn't progress further than the second outlook.

The Va side lends itself, I think, to more dramatic landscapes - what, once upon a time use to be called "sublime". The Md side is easier to paint on a smaller scale, more intimate, in a way.

Walking across the bridge from the second outlook I caught this:

The leaves are largely gone, and the winds and the rain have dealt us winter scenes earlier than usual. Too bad, I was hoping for autumn views to last a little longer.


I wasn't really very happy with the pictures I took on the Virginia side and so I returned again on Saturday morning before sunrise, I mean when it was dark. Surprise, Surprise. Even at that early hour the parking lot was thronged with photographers. Unusual, but fortunately, we didn't seem to get in each others' way.

Here's a picture of the dawn - this time shooting from the third overlook. (if I thought it was better than it is I would clean up the bottom foreground.)

The light, as we all know, is quite bluish at this time of the morning. Here's one shot I really liked.

Pictures like this, I find, raise questions in "post-processing" as to whether to "correct" the white balance. The blue shot is more or less as obtained from the camera with a setting of daylight white balance. However a shot of a grey card taken at the same time will suggest really warming the picture to  a yellow-magenta hue. I don't like that look, preferring this cold blue. Others, I know, prefer a different look. One of those areas where there is no "correct" answer, I think.

There are particular bands of the river which, when shot from this overlook, really give a sense of the power and tumult of the cascading water. Below is one section which I've had better luck with on other occasions.  On a bright morning a couple of years ago, after some torrential rains, I got more impressive - wilder - pictures of just this stretch.

 Don't know why, seems a bit flat to me; perhaps the grey sky dampens the contrast and so reduces vivacity. It's all about the light we are told.

As mentioned there were lots of photographers and it is a pastime to take pictures of one another.

For once the pictures aren't half-bad but it's really the grandeur of the scenery, I think,  that compels interest.

Finally, as again, everybody probably knows, there is access to the river between Overlooks Two and Three down a steep pile of rocks, a place called Fisherman's Eddy. Photographer number two above, the one standing close to the water, has climbed down those stairs. I made it half-way down and met him on the way  up. He looked very cold but said he had got some wonderful pictures. Later a fisherman went all the way down but soon enough came back again; the water was running too fast, he said, for the fish to linger for his bait. I could have told him that.

Anyway, I stopped half-way down for this picture:

Those rocks are truly impressive.

So much for the Falls. Not, I'm afraid, an urban landscape, but that's what I've been shooting this last week, because, to me at least, it appeared a place of especial interest after the storm.

Best,

Farid