Location Taken: Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010
There are times when an imperfect photo transcends its imperfection, wraps it around itself, and becomes stronger because of it.
This, as you may have presumed was one of those times.
The conditions were horrible for photography. It was raining, somewhat foggy, and quickly getting dark. The lighting was already too dim for my camera to focus right, and there were certainly no interesting shadows coming out of the ambient glow that was all that remained of the day.
We had been planning on camping at Kakabeka Falls. Thanks to the rain that had been pouring down all day, that plan was washed away, and we ended up staying at the first hotel we found, some 20 miles or more down the road. Still, we stopped at the Falls, even though it wasn’t exactly tourist weather. I tried to take pictures of it, and well, technically, I succeeded. None of them turned out right though, not even this one. I’d been trying to get the focus on the trees in front, if I recall correctly. That didn’t work.
Instead, I got the focus, the exceedingly soft focus, down near the river in the background. The trees in the front blurred some. Meanwhile, a pure coincidence of light and the settings my camera chose for this shot made the pale fog glow blue in the distance. The photo I took not ten seconds after this one, of the exact same location, had the trees severely darkened and the background dull and uninteresting. The strength of this photo, the way it speaks of the hidden mysteries of the forests and rivers, I do not know how to create such art at will. At least, not yet.
