Location Taken: Just West of Thunder Bay, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010
This, my friends, is Kakabeka Falls!
It’s a pretty large waterfall on a river feeding into the western side of Lake Superior. And um, look at all that water falling!
Admittedly, between the mist from the falls, the rain, and the quickly fading light, my camera wasn’t too happy taking a clear photo. This was the clearest of twenty or so attempts. And the rain caused other problems too. We’d been planning on camping at the campground right by the falls, but well, setting up a tent in the rain is not at all a good idea. Water gets trapped, mildew starts to grow, the tent starts to deteriorate, and so on. Plus even the best tent doesn’t have perfect waterproofing, and most of the focus is put into protecting from water from above, not below…
So while we stopped at the falls, we didn’t stay long, for we still had to find a hotel to spend the night. And this being sparsely populated western Ontario, it took a while. I think we went some 30 miles or more before we finally found a tiny roadside hotel. That might have been the one that was having problems with their water and handed us a bunch of water bottles for our use when we checked in…
Oh, and according to a brief mention in an interesting documentary I watched the other day, called Mysteries of the Great Lakes, right below these falls are where a group of lake sturgeon spawn! They’re kinda like salmon in that way, except they’re a more ancient species, not to mention smart enough to reserve enough energy to make it back to the lake just fine after the spawning run. Oh, and don’t get fooled by the title of that documentary. It’s not really about Great Lake Mysteries at all, and more about the wildlife, mostly the sturgeon. But it’s still an interesting watch, and also where I heard about the Agawa Bay pictographs I mentioned a few days ago.
But yeah, falls. Yay, waterfalls. There’s probably a great view from that bridge, too. I think that was the route to the campground, so we didn’t go on it. So sad.
It was dark when you took that photograph. We had reached Kakabeka Falls after sunset and the clouds cut off the twilight. How did you get the photo so bright? Long exposure, or post-processing? The only hint of the darkness is the lights on the bridge.
I didn’t recognize the falls from the photo, because I remembered them shrouded in darkness.
It’s so bright for the same reason it’s blurry. The shutter (the thing on the camera that lets in light to make the photo) is opened longer in dim conditions to let in enough light for the photo. This does mean that there’s more opportunities for small muscle movements to shift the camera and blur the photo, though.