Location Taken: Ithaca, New York
Time Taken: March 2010
My mom has a rather strong fondness for waterfalls, so we visit a large number of them. This particular one is Ithaca Falls, in Ithaca, New York. The water passes right by Cornell University before dropping a hundred feet or so, down the thin-strata slate of the area, and then winding its way over to Lake Cayuga, one of the larger of the Finger Lakes. The Finger lakes are glacial lakes, carved in the land when a mile-thick sheet of ice covered this area. They are very deep lakes, too, and the above-water sections of their valleys are steep-sloped. This means waterfalls abound in this area, cascading over the rocks in many beautiful variations of the dance of water, rock, and air.
Can you tell I’m fond of waterfalls too?
They’re interesting subjects to photograph. For one thing, there’s a rather good chance the light won’t be right, and it gets worse the deeper the valley it’s falling into is. Waterfalls erode rock, so they form notches in the valley – which mean that for three of the four directions, there will be some pretty serious shadows down in the valley. And the fourth has to be both angled right to catch the sunlight, and then it has to be the right time of day and for that matter day. Add in the fact that the most dynamic lighting involves light coming in from the side, rather than from the front or the top, and yeah, the lighting will be less than ideal. There are some waterfalls that get around this, thanks to sheer size or a rare quirk in the lay of the land, but most are secluded in their notches, and frequently surrounded by trees to boot.
So, since the lighting is less than ideal, how do you get a good photo of a waterfall? By using the other tricks of the photographer’s trade. Light is only one of the factors, after all, as important as it is. For this photo, I chose to focus on something other than the waterfall itself: a small tree, still leafless in late winter. It had a nice selection of rocks around it, and I could easily frame it in front of the waterfall. The light on the tree was poor – it was in shadow just as the waterfall was, but that actually helped some. The tree has a darker tone – which contrasts quite nicely against the white of the falling water. It’s nearly grayscale, in a cast of brown-grays rather than true grays. There’s a range of values, from the white of the water to the near-black of the shadows of the rocks. I may not have been able to get the brilliance shadows can bring to a photo, but I used what was available to its fullest.
