Photo Friday: Currents
After the break: Private train cars, cool atmospheric Swedish photography and a vacation sanity check
I hope everyone had a fun, safe Halloween last night. I had a ball in one of those dinosaur suits and managed to both frighten and delight a bunch of neighborhood kids, so I consider that quite a win.
I have two photos to share this week. Let’s dive in!
Photos
1.
I really wasn’t sure if this photo was going to turn out. There’s a lot going on, and when I was taking it, I was concerned that it was going to be too busy. There’s an obvious focal point in the waterfall, but all of the layers of rock and the trees were a lot.
On top of that, it was a pretty cloudy day. That can really mute the colors in a way that makes it hard to get a good finished image out of them. I swear, as much as I love the pine trees in the mountains, it is nearly impossible to edit them well under anything less than perfect conditions.
Instead of trying to force color into the image, I leaned into what it actually was, which is a pretty flat image that puts the motion of the fall and the leading lines around it in focus.
Most of what I did here was just adjust the color tone from an overwhelmingly brown, warm image to a more cool one. There was mist and environmental haze, but instead of trying to work around that, I just gave into it. When you’ve got a waterfall to shoot, people expect some mist and haze and it doesn’t look so out of place.
I didn’t spend a lot of time fiddling around with different shutter speeds trying to capture the water elegantly. I was able to capture it the way I like to see a waterfall, which is to freeze the water clearly at the top and catch some motion blur the further down it goes. I did experiment with a multi-second long exposure during other parts of the trip, but I rarely find that it works for me.
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2.
One of the things I’m always looking for when I shoot is zig-zagging lines in a composition. I’m such a sucker for them, and you’ll see that in a lot of what I post. It adds both balance and interest to an image. I’ve always looked for things like this, but it was only in the last five or so years that I recognized it in my own work and was able to actively seek it when I’m out shooting.
Canyons are an excellent provider of this kind of composition because the path that the water has carved is rarely ever a straight line. It always meanders and I just love that.
This version of that theme was really fun for me because you really only get to see a little bit of the river snaking through the canyon, but so much of it is implied in the layers of mountain ridges in the frame.
I will admit that this edit tends toward the trendy. It’s very much an orange-and-teal edit that got extremely popular with a lot of people on Instagram in the past five or ten years. I didn’t intend to go this way, but I wanted the colors to pop a little more than they did naturally without having to fight with a ton of contrast, which I think can overwhelm an image1.
I wanted you to actually see the water of the river and I wanted you to see the orange in the rock. The oranges are a tad redder than they are in real life, and the river is not that bright. But it’s my image and I can dye if I want to.
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Links
1. The Private Train Car Edition by Why Is This Interesting
I really like trains. I’m not the kind of train nerd who knows every detail about every train on the tracks2. I’m the kind of person who likes trains who just waves at every train she sees and tries to take the train when she visits a new city. And then posts a story on Instagram that’s a photo of me on a train with a caption of “TRAINS TRAINS TRAINS” or something.
So when I saw this piece about people who would actually hitch their own private train cars to rail cars, it kind of broke my brain. Apparently it was very common for rich people to have private train cars, and then they would just decide to go somewhere and tell their lackies to get the car hitched up and then they’d ride on it. It’s just incredible.
I desperately want to take one of those scenic rail tours one day. It’d be a dream come true.
2. HINTERLAND by Markus Naarttijärvi
I was introduced to this photographer via a newsletter I subscribe to called
. It was this image in particular that drew my eye in the email, and I was immediately drawn in.
I’ve found some really great photographers through this newsletter before, but this one is my favorite so far. Click through the link to see more images like these. Markus’ use of color is so radically different from mine, and is informed by the subjects and environments that he shoots. There’s a discipline in his color usage that I really appreciate, and I’m also drawn to the strong lines in his compositions.
3. Is everyone but me taking $10,000 vacations? by Lyndsey Stanberry
I recognize how lucky I’ve been this year to have travelled to some amazing places, all of which have been brand new to me and allowed me to get incredible images. That said, this year is an outlier for travel for my husband and me, and I don’t expect us to be going as many new places in the coming years.
We’ve also done a lot of research to try and get the most bang for our buck, especially when it comes to accommodations, because this is an area that we’re willing to compromise on if it saves us money on a trip that we otherwise might not be able to take. And that’s fine with us!
When this piece by Lyndsey hit my inbox earlier this week, it brought up some thoughts I’d been having for ages. On one hand, I do know of people who always seem to be travelling and staying in wonderful places and flying first class. On the other hand, it also made me realize that all the travelling I’ve done this year probably looks extravagant to a lot of people. So I just want to take a moment to be thankful for all the opportunities I have had this year.
That’s not to say that there isn’t contrast in this image, there’s just less than I ordinarily end up with in one.
I’m not this kind of nerd about anything, actually. I don’t necessarily enjoy memorizing everything there is to know about a subject. I’m the kind of nerd that gets visibly excited when I talk about something that I’m interested in. This is actually a really valuable professional skill, especially as a jack-of-all-trades.