Brice Creek
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but I’ve often said that any day out photographing is a great day, even if you don’t come home with any photographs. By that standard, our trip this past Sunday to Brice Creek was a great day.
It’s not that we didn’t come home with any photographs, it’s just that the photographs I came home with didn’t pass muster for one reason or another. The same is true for Ann. Neither of us were particularly pleased with our images. Perhaps its because our standards are getting higher and higher. Or perhaps it’s that the conditions were just so difficult. Or perhaps it is as simple as nothing really seemed to move or excite me, so I wound up making images that were more an exercise of the eye and mind than of the heart. David DuChemin says to not discount the role of making sketch images, so I’ll place them in that category.
But I still have a blog to write and want to keep at it, so I have to come up with something - right? Despite the lack of superb images, I decided to write about the process involved in making the handful of images I made last Sunday and the many different things that went through my brain during the roughly two hours we were photographing at Parker Falls.
If you’ve followed our blog for awhile, you’ll be familiar with this location despite the fact that we didn’t make it here even once last year (where did the time go?).
The first thing that struck us was that everything seemed particularly dark and wet, even though it hadn’t rained for a couple of days. Fortunately the water was clear; unfortunately it was really high and flowing rapidly. The combination of wet conditions and high water limited our ability to take advantage of the interesting blue color and patterning of the rocks the creek flows through. We had to look elsewhere for inspiration.
After carefully making our way down the steep trail to the falls, I decided to try to take advantage of the bright green mosses (it seemed like they glowed) and the exposed white tree trunks that are usually quite hidden by leaves. I placed myself at the top of a giant rock outcropping that forms the bend around which the creek and falls wind, my back up against a giant chest-tall log that has been there ever since first visited the location.
I started out with a slightly wider angle lens than I usually use from this distance in an effort to get a broader view of the creek and the hillside. I didn’t want to go wider because the upper part of the image is not very attractive, nor was the area below where I’d framed. As I looked at the image I decided to first compose with the log on the left to balance out the image and to give some visual diversity to the scene.
The exposure became problematic for a number of reasons. First off, despite the fact that the sun had not yet risen over the hillside (the sun is off to the left), the contrast of the scene slightly exceeded the capability of the sensor. The rushing white water was so bright that if I exposed so that it wasn’t washed out, everything else would be very dark. Which it was - I had to lighten the mid-tones and shadows significantly to get the image to appear as it did to my eyes. Increasing the exposure at all totally washed out the rapids and there would have been no texture at all.
Second, finding a good shutter speed was a nightmare. Given that it was dark, the camera wanted a very slow shutter speed. However, given that the water was rushing really fast, a slow shutter speed caused so much blurring there was no texture in the water (similar to an over exposure). My solution was to crank up the ISO of the camera (which lessens the image quality a bit), just to get something in the water. At least I had no need to use a neutral density filter to slow down the shutter speed to get an acceptable shutter speed like I often have to do.
Third, I realized the wet rocks were reflecting the sky and looked “shiny”. Generally, there’s a solution to that - pull out the polarizing filter. However, that presented me with two problems. First, it would add time to the exposure, which means I’d have to crank up the ISO a lot to keep the exposure time I’d decided was right for the scene. Second, I found out that as I rotated the filter (to remove the sheen from the rocks on the left), it revealed the dark sheen on the rocks on the right (now dark). I couldn’t get the sheen off both at the same time because they’re oriented at different angles. I decided that the sheen on the left side rocks were better, which gave me the perfect solution. Forget about the polarizing filter.
After making my images and thinking about them a bit, I realized that by framing the log on the left, I’d ignored one of the things that had attracted me in the first place - the white trunked trees along the bank on the right. So I recomposed the image.
While it better emphasized the trees reaching over the creek better, and definitely emphasized the lovely mossed rocks to the right, this image seems unbalanced with the creek coming in from the left, but not even making it half way across the image before it drops down almost vertically off the page. What a poor composition. In discussing our images, Ann had mentioned that things would have looked very differently if that dark dip to the right was actually a creek that flowed into this one and had white water in it too. She’s right - but that’s something photographers have to live with that painters don’t. We’re stuck with what nature gives us. Still, the mosses on the rocks in this image are just lovely.
I decided to stick with my original idea of the white trees arching over the creek and explored a bit to find a spot near the right edge of the above image. Again, finding just the right spot was problematic. I wound up having to switch over to my widest lens and still didn’t get enough of the foreground mosses that I wanted.
I guess I could have gotten a lot lower to try and capture more of the mosses while still keeping the arching tree branch, but I often find such low angled shots contrived (not that I haven’t done it or seen images that had done it well). Anyway, if I’d done that, the water flowing through the creek would have appeared much narrower on the left and up through the image - a sacrifice that I don’t think would have been worth it.
After making that image, I spent another bit wandering around looking for a different image. I settled on one looking downstream from this location and moved towards the edge of the creek to make it.
I often find photographing down-stream as opposed to upstream a bit disorienting. It’s the case here, but the strong back swell of water that’s in the foreground of this image makes up a bit for that (as does the curl of green moss along the bottom). And the log leaning on the cliff at the end of the chute helps to end the image and was something I decided to work on some more a bit later.
Framing the image was particularly difficult. While I wanted to get a bit more of the rock outcropping on the left (where Ann and I had been photographing from earlier), there was a particularly ugly tree there that simply didn’t work. So the branches intrude into this image in a very unappealing way. Swinging the image any more to the right simply weakened the composition, and lost the sense of a wall on the left. The image also had to be cropped at a particular point on the top as well. If you look to the upper right you can see a dark tree. Just outside the frame is a white paper board declaring that this is a registered mining claim named “Geisha Girl” and that mining at this site is not permitted. There are a lot of such claims along the creeks in this area and every once in a while you see folks panning for gold. My assumption is that they’re doing it more for pleasure than for profit. I’ll stick with my cameras.
After finishing that shot I decided to climb over the log (boy did my pants get messy) and investigate the possibilities for that log in the background. Just off to the left of the image above, where the creek turns left, is Parker Falls. So the rock outcropping to the left goes from being a few feet above the water to approximately 30 or so feet above the water. As I made my way around, I had to try out a couple of locations that jut outward from the hill to find a spot that allowed me to frame the image I wanted.
I swapped lenses to a longer focal length to get closer to this dip before the falls and was faced with the same exposure time issues I dealt with earlier. Only this time the polarizing filter helped things a lot when it came to the reflective rock surfaces, though it wrecked havoc for getting a good texture in the water. Then again, the water flowing here was so violent I doubt that it would have been appealing at any shutter speed, so I was pretty much stuck with what I had.
By that time I was pretty tired of trying to work with rough water, so I started looking around. Given that I was pretty much standing on a cliff face, I had some interesting views of the trees down below looking down stream and the trees on the cliff side directly across the creek. I decided to do a bit of experimenting.
Len gave Ann and me a wonderful book by William Neill for Christmas. We’ve decided to do an exercise recommended by David DuChemin and study a different photographer every month. January’s photographer is William Neill (thanks Len) so I started thinking about a set of his images where he frames only portions of trees to create an image. Not a detailed closeup, but a tightly-framed shot where one doesn’t necessarily see the base or the full tree, where the branches extend off each of the frames of the image.
In the chaos of woods that is Oregon, it was a tough exercise. A couple of the images I made are so bad I won’t subject you to them. But these are my first feeble efforts at trying to understand why I find William Neill’s images so appealing.
I forget where I read it, but Ansel once said that he found Oregon to be incredibly lush and beautiful . . . and impossible to photograph. I guess I’m not alone.
And yet another experiment:
Sketch images! Yeah, that’s what they are . . . . sketch images!
And as if to better explain what kind of day it was, as we were getting ready to call it a day (the sun was starting to creep down the hill side and make photographing a true nightmare) and I was in the midst of . . . relieving myself, I saw a final image that would take “just a minute” to photograph. Famous last words.
I’d seen an interesting tree root ball nestled in a tight draw with ferns at the base that I thought would make an interesting image. Significantly, there was a rock on the other side of the draw facing it that I could perch my tripod on, so I hiked down to it. Sure enough, I had a view of the root ball, but a bunch of branches stuck up into the image I had framed.
No worries, I framed the image, swapping lenses a couple of times and going in tighter (too tight I now think) to focus on the stump. Yeah, only a minute . . . . Then I asked Ann to come over and press my camera shutter for me while I climbed down off the rock to deal with the wiry tree branches. In the end I had one foot holding down one branch, my other leg pushing another branch away, one branch in each of my hands, and then l leaned forward to push the remainder of the branches away with my body. (Am I nuts or what). It at least gave my camera a clear view!
On further reflection, I wish I’d made two more photographs of this scene. First would have been to have Ann take a photograph of me leaning on the branches (no trees were hurt making this photograph - no cracked branches, no leaves torn!). The other would have been to use a wider lens to capture the area to the left and the sense of being in a draw that I found so interesting to begin with. I think I framed away from that area initially because of all the branches - which I think I wound up moving out of the way!
I guess that’s one of the things I need to work on - to not get so absorbed with framing an image that I forget what initially attracted me to it. Or to think about working the image more before I pack up and head out. Which is what we did!
So that was it. An engaging morning that didn’t produce anything of particular note. But that’s the way it is a lot of the time. And as I said before, the morning was just great. Despite its frustrations.