From the Bedroom Window and Elsewhere

When I stumbled out of bed sometime before 6AM on Monday morning. I saw through the bedroom that it was foggy and that this created a ring around the almost full moon.

I grabbed my camera, fiddled with the settings as best I could through bleary an blurry eyes, and snapped a photo. In b&w with some adjusting of exposure, this was the result.

Several hours later, Sue called me back to the same window to see the dramatic wall of cloud which most likely indicates the passing of a weather front.

As the morning progressed, I edited a few more whitewater photos from the previous day.

Contrary to common thought, part of the reason for working with time exposures on moving water is to actually capture a photo that is more or less like what the eyes see. When you capture the water in one still photo with a fast shutter speed, you freeze the action, which is not the way that we actually perceive the moving water when we are there.

In the above photo, I'd say that the fall over the rock edge is close to what I saw (except for the blue processing which is my artistic choice which I probably overdid) although the rushing water below the rock face is possibly a little more blurry than what I saw. It's a trick to get everything right, and then you don't always want to because there is also such a thing as creative licence.

I would say that the shutter speed that I used for the photo below produced a pretty faithful rendition of the sight that I beheld.

To repeat: we don't see rushing water freeze-framed with our naked eyes, but we can make an effort at depicting the scene accurately (or artistically if we prefer) in camera with time exposures. Usually something just a little under or over a second will get you close.

I quite enjoyed my morning, both taking and editing photos.