A Rainy Day

The sky is grey and the air misty. Water drips from the trees half stripped of their leaves by the cool autumn winds. My clothes are wet and muddy and my feet are soaked even inside my boots from the slog up the ravine. A day and a night of steady rain hasn’t completely stopped yet. The sound of white rushing water echoing and re-echoing back and forth between the rock walls fills my ears so I can’t hear the beep of the timer on my camera or the snap of the mirror.

I’m starting to get a chill. I’ve put the camera away in my pack two or three times and started to walk away, but then I see something new and I get it out again and start setting the tripod back up.

Finally it is time to move on. I cannot go forward - steep walls on each side and the waterfall in front force me to retreat back down the ravine. I slosh through the water as it speeds past me down and around the stones carrying yellow leaves on its back. Ah, but wait, there’s something interesting over there – better get the camera out again.  

Chimney Bluffs

Just a quick note today about a quick trip I made to Chimney Bluffs State Park on Lake Ontario just east if Sodas Point.

I generally like to get an early start when I head out to take pictures. Photographers learned early on that the low angle of the sun in the early morning and in the evening provides some of the best lighting conditions for pictures. The light is on the “warm” (tending to yellow or orange) side with long, but not too intense shadows that can be handled by the narrow exposure latitude (relative to our eyes) of film or digital media.

On this day I was busy in the morning and didn’t get a chance to get out until the afternoon on a day with bright sunshine. On the plus side, the year is getting old so the sun angle drops early in the afternoon and the sky was covered in lots of puffy white clouds that I thought could work well as a background.

The soil along this part of the lake shore is very unstable and the elements combine to carve the bluffs into tall jagged spires rising from the edge of the water high into the air. The bluffs aren’t stone. If you touch them, they just crumble and slide away. You need to be careful when approaching the cliff edges as they might very well collapse.

The strong sun made for some stark contrasts between the dark and the light sides of the bluffs. Oddly enough the cotton candy clouds that were everywhere today, were non-existent over the lake with a strong breeze blowing inland. I wasn’t happy with a lot of my shots of the bluffs. The sky was blank and so was the water which didn’t provide much of a background for the bluffs which also tend to be bare and blank and dull brown all over.

I’ll have to go back another day. However, the shoreline always provides other interesting things to shoot like driftwood and rocks and waves so it wasn’t a total loss photo-wise. Besides I use the photo thing to provide an excuse to get outdoors and and feel the sun on my face and hear the roar of the waves and breathethat watery fishy lake shorey smell. Just being out and about was worth the trip photos or no.

MDW