Reconnecting with nature through hiking, camping, and paddling
Photographs of the land and the environment
My friends I and were on a multiday canoe trip on the Rappahannock River in July. One evening we rounded a bend in the river to see massive storm clouds building down river. Fortunately the storm took an alternate course and we were spared scrambling ashore to wait it out.
The fixed, hard stone provides an ideal path for water to rush down the mountain. The stone may seem immobile and rigid but in time it will be defeated by the steady pounding of the water and the quiet, patience of the moss. For now they share this space and offer a beautiful, peaceful spot to sit and rest.
I love these mountain pools in Shenandoah National Park. This one is downstream from Dark Hollow Falls but you can find scenes like this throughout the park.
Click on the image to see a larger version of the photograph.
When my friend and I reached the bottom of Dark Hollow Falls I decide to challenge myself a little. I switched to a 50mm prime lense, rather than the two zoom lenses I had been using all morning. My challenge was to only shoot with the prime lense for the rest of our hike.
When we arrived at this spot I immediately found myself frustrated because I couldn’t frame the entire waterfall with a 50mm lense. It was simply too big and we couldn’t get very far away from it. Knowing my wide angle zoom would easily frame the scene only made the whole situation more annoying. Sticking to my self imposed challenge I started looking for different perspectives and ended up with this. I am absolutely certain I would not have taken this photo if I was using the lense I normally shoot with.
Sometimes forcing yourself to do things differently can lead to different ways of seeing things.
The other side of the building on the right is a lovely little downtown restaurant. It’s funny how quickly the scene changes when you walk half a block, around to this end of the building. Despite the litter and trash, I like the lines, the flow and the contrast of this image.
If you click the photo above you can see a larger image of it.
This rusty piling seems out of place among the old wooden posts.
I wanted to capture contrasts in this image. The bright sunlight filling the upper right corner of the frame versus the dark shadows of the stones. There’s also the serene, softly moving ripples on the water contrasting with the smooth but fixed and solid stones.
Sometimes we can find our duality in the simplest places. Without hard there is no soft. Without bright there is no dark.
I had some other ideas for this week’s photo challenge but I was walking through the woods and the reflection of the trees in this stream caught my attention. Perhaps too literal a treatment of this week’s theme but I liked the color and the stillness of the water at this spot.
Sometimes being a morning person pays off. I took this photo during a trip to the beach last August. I noticed the cloud bank that night and thought it was a shame the clouds probably wouldn’t be there at sunrise. To my great surprise, the clouds barely moved overnight! I awoke before dawn and watched this amazing sunrise slowly transform into morning.
As hot mineral water seeps out of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park it leaves tiny layers of minerals. The heat of the water provides an ideal environment for bacteria, which grow in colorful mats over the wavy mineral deposits. The end result is an amazing display of color and texture.