Frozen Land, Not So Frozen Falls

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Location Taken: Niagara Falls, New York
Time Taken: December 2009

Niagara Falls during winter looks a bit different than what you see in the photos in that fancy book of waterfalls your Grandmother keeps on the coffee table.

Now, the falls themselves are pretty much the same, a little bit of cold isn’t going to keep that much water from flowing over the escarpment. But the surrounding area, that’s different.

For one thing, there’s only a bare handful of people rattling around this tourist trap of a town. It’s really odd to see all the fancy buildings and restaurants (ok, once-fancy buildings, the town is well past its golden age and all the buildings are dated and getting a little run-down) closed down and inoperative. It feels a little post-apocalyptic, even, like you’re looking at the ruins of a more innocent time.

Still, even in the heart of winter, there’s a few hardy souls visiting the waterfalls.

And they are fantastic falls. Though I’m so used to seeing photos taken from the Canadian side (it’s much more dramatic at that angle) that the whole setup on the American side seems, well, backwards. Like I snuck in the back door and am seeing all the fishing wire holding up the flying boat in a play or something.

And then there’s the snow. There was about an inch of it all around, with footprints showing where people had taken shortcuts off the main paths covering the gentle slope of the viewing park. It colored the world white. Well, at least the parts of it that weren’t brown leafless trees. I’m sure they’re beautiful when they’re not ragged sticks-on-top-of-larger-sticks, but yeah, deciduous trees just don’t show their best face in winter.

And last but certainly not least, there is the ice. It’s not on the river, mind you, that’s moving too fast for ice to form. But that waterfall knocks up a lot of fine spray, and not all of it lands back in the river. The rest of it creates a fine coat of wetness on the surrounding rocks and trees – well, at least it would during the summer. In winter, that thin layer of water freezes solid quite quickly. And then another cloud of vapor settles on top of it, and the ice layer grows. Grass gains a white coating, or if it gets enough, turns into those odd shapes you see at the bottom of the photo. That’s from about an inch of ice covering, and it’s long since merged together.

But still, the falling water still falls.

  

Walking on the Park Trail

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

There’s a lovely path that runs along the river in the park near my house.

Well, runs along isn’t quite the right word. It’s halfway up the hill, after all, and it’s a bit of a climb down to the water. Especially in the areas below the waterfall, since while the water level drops, the path stays at about the same level. One end of the path is at the main bridge crossing over the river, which is why it’s up so high.

I go walking on the path every so often, bringing either a dog or a camera with me. This day was obviously a camera day.

I can’t walk the dog and take photos at the same time. Both of our dogs seem convinced that if they don’t pull on the leash as hard as they can, the world will end. Or worse, we’ll never walk them again. It’s not exactly conductive to carefully lining up a perfect shot.

I’ve never walked to the end of this path. I’ve always turned around partway. It’s less than a mile long, but it gets narrower the further away from the main entrance you go, it’s on the wrong side of the river for me to just loop around, and it ends in a gated suburb anyway, rather than connecting back to anywhere I go.

I used to use it when walking to the library, since while there is a sidewalk on the road to there, it’s all in the sun, while the path is nicely shaded. But that required taking a small side path that lead into a trailer park by the library, and I don’t think that path’s there any more. The trailer park certainly is. The county moved out all the residents, then, after ten or so years of the lot being vacant, it got developed into townhouses. Expensive townhouses that look like all the other townhouses that have been built all over this area in the last ten years.

I think I preferred the trailer park. At least that was affordable to live in.

  

A Painting of Painted Ladies – ok, make that Lady Slippers.

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Time Drawn: Summer 2010

After taking a Chinese Painting class, I started experimenting with the techniques I’d learned in it.

One of those experiments was trying to paint other types of flowers in the Spontaneous style I’d learned, distilling them down to their essence and then putting that on the paper in a few strokes.

This was my most successful attempt.

It’s a set of lady slipper flowers, which have that odd “slipper” petal. Which, since it’s solidly a three-dimensional feature, is a bit tough to draw. I had to use variations in ink tone to get that look, which is far more difficult and easy to mess up than you’d think. Just imagine painting with two colors on your brush, trying not to mix them together too much.

The leaves aren’t that special, though I did like that I got some texture inside the leaves that matches the vein patterns of the real plant pretty well.

And the whole piece looks yellow because of a combination of the paper I used and the lighting I had (indoor lighting is yellow-tinted). I used newsprint, a large, cheap paper that is exactly the same as what you get in newspapers. For those who have never bought a newspaper, that means low-quality slightly course paper that tears easily. I used it because, well, it’s cheap, and it actually has the right level of bleed qualities that I like.

…Bleed quality means how far the ink/paint travels on the paper when you apply it. Some papers have no bleed, and a small wet drop of black ink stays in place. Others have a lot of bleed, and that drop will quadruple in size and gain fuzzy edges. High bleed papers are actually used a lot in Chinese painting, since that fuzziness gives you a lot of possibilities and all you need to do to get firm lines on the paper is use less water for the paint.

Heh, “all”, I say that as if it was easy.

  

A Tale of Two Sunsets – no wait, false alarm, same sunset.

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Location Taken: Columbia, MD
Time Taken: August 2010

Hmmm… I’ve already posted a picture of this sunset. And I’ve even talked about the lake before. Doesn’t leave me much to talk about, especially for a sunset photo.

Still, this picture has a different composition and general feel than that other photo of the sunset, so I have no qualms about posting it. I’m not exactly going to turn down an excellent photo just because I have another excellent photo of the same subject. Heck, at some point you’ll see a third photo of this sunset, also in the best category! (It was that good of a sunset.)

At least I’m trying to space out the similar photos.

  

A Fuzzy Photo of a Fantastic Volcano

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Location Taken: Northern Oregon
Time Taken: June 2008

This is my one and only photo of Mount Hood.

Yes, the photo is of a sideview mirror on the car reflecting a blurry image of Mount Hood.

Despite going along the Columbia River Gorge (which goes right by Mount Hood), and then heading south into Oregon along the highways in the Willamette valley which also goes near Mount Hood for a while, I managed not to get any photos of it. And I’ve even been through the Gorge twice!

It’s geography and weather’s fault, you see. The Columbia River Gorge has high cliff walls in the area near Mount Hood, since the river had to carve its way through the hills surrounding the volcano. And, being the Pacific Northwest, the trees are really tall and block what little view the rocks let through. And, again, being the Pacific Northwest, clouds are really common and covered the mountain for a lot of the time.

The second time I went through the Gorge, the weather was fine. I was just asleep during the time I was near Mount Hood.

And thus came this photo. I realized that I didn’t have a picture of this fine volcano and that we could finally get a good view of it. Unfortunately, we’d passed it already, and I couldn’t get a stable shot when I tried to get a direct shot, and besides, the car got in the way. The sideview mirror was more stable, though, so that’s the shot I kept. Yes it’s blurry, but at least you can tell it’s a mountain.

As for why I bothered, well, it’s a VOLCANO! I like volcanoes! And I’d already gotten some nice shots of Mt. St. Helens and a lot of photos of Mt. Rainier, and even some of the Three Sisters volcanoes that are the next down the chain, so I wanted to complete the set.

Admittedly, I didn’t get any of the cascade volcanoes further north than Rainier, or south of the Three Sisters, and I missed Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams… I mean, there’s 20 major volcanoes in the Cascade chain running from British Columbia to Northern California, most of them quite able to erupt again, and I only got photos of six of them… Hmmm… Guess I’ve got my work cut out for me. Now if only I lived closer than 2000 miles away from them…