I recently decided to try to participate in #FlickrFridays. It is a pretty lame thing, really. A bunch of loney or bored people on the internet participate in a weekly challenge to try to create and post an image that pertains to a given topic. But … I am bit always surrounded by social circumstances and I am often looking for something to occupy my mind, so I figure I would give this thing a a whirl.
The first topic that I have come to us #tension. Immediately, I thought of physical tension, especially in cords, and lines, and strings. I also considered the idea of emotional tension. The first interpretation, of course, is far more easy to capture than the latter.
So … last weekend I would take my camera and tripod to 3 Falls Woods and see if I could create any waterfall images; I would think about “tension” while I was there. I walked the upper grounds and didn’t find too much that appealed to me, really. I couldn’t get anything to work. The cascades are immediately to the right when accessing the falls from trailhead at Sweet Road are neat, but not at all pretty (the moss is overgrown, looks more like algae, and covers all the rocks). I have tried to capture these with a wide shot in the past and it is short of unimpressive.
This time, then, I decided that I would try to find portions of the falls to capture and process in monochrome, but I still failed to compose something that I was happy with. I took a few pictures, but the compositions were too difficult. It is really difficult to frame something interesting and leave out all the messy shit that is scattered to the sides of the falls.
I moved on to see if I could find something that appealed to my eye up higher and closer to Rt 173. Athough the fall here are not ugly, the leaves on the trees were to sparse and there was nothing that was catching my eye, so I decided to experiment with some ICM with the fish-eye lens. I figure that if it is a toy lens, I might as well learn to treat it like one, right?
I rather enjoyed some of the creations when moving the camera. The surprises were fun.
After a short while, it was time for me to return home to take Victoria to softball practice. As I walked back to the car I marveled at the small drops of water that were on the budding leaves. I had been so intent to get to the falls that I had neglected to notice them the first time I had passed. When I was nearly to the car, Christine messaged me: practice was cancelled and I could stay out a little bit longer. I immediately turned around and started hunting for photogenic water drops.
I came upon what must have been the best drop on the property. I was so (relatively) large and just about to fall. I hurried to get set-up and close with the macro lens without jostling anything that would lead it to fall. I hoped that I could find a composition soon enough. Time, as they say, was of the essence. And as I was setting up it occurred to me that this was #tension. There was tension between the water, the leaf, and gravity. I was experiencing tension to set-up in the moment. There was the tension that accompanies anticipation. When would it fall?
I set-up the camera, turned on focus stacking (which I have not used or practiced in over a year), framed it up as best as I could, set the 2-second timer, and captured my safety shot.
Then, and only then, was I willing to get a little closer and from the angle that I really wanted. I tweaked the settings a little for the focus stack, re-positioned the camera, refocused, and clicked the shutter. Later, I would do very little in post and export it to Flickr.
3 days later it was my first image (and perhaps my last?) to be featured on the Flickr’s front/explore page. Granted, it is meaningless, but meaningless-things can be nice once in a while too.