Location Taken: Great Falls of the Potomac, Border of Virginia and Maryland
Time Taken: June 2008
Every so often I come across one of my photos with a bit of a dreamlike impossibility about them.
Usually it’s like this one, where it comes from looking downstream on a waterfall.
The brain tries to find an even surface to make as its baseline slope when interpreting images, so if you’ve got a slight slope, especially one sloping away from you, every so often the brain will choose that instead of a true flat.
Which makes this photo look like the water is all on the same level, like a lake would be, but it still has the motion and odd shapes in the water from it flowing around the rocks.
And speaking of the rocks, they certainly aren’t helping orient the viewer. This area has a serious tilt on the strata! Which is what makes it such a fabulously awesome set of falls, but hey…
I suspect if I’d, say, taken this using high dynamic range techniques to bring out the color and contrast, this would be one of my masterpiece photos. As it is, though, the colors are just flat enough and the haze just strong enough that, while it’s still a good photo, it’s not a great one.
Maybe, once the leaves have filled out the trees once again, I should head back down to this spot and try to get that perfect photo…
