Waterfalls are hard to photograph. You can’t really capture the sounds, the smells, the lingering dampness that stretches a half mile from the fall itself. It’s a gut-deep experience. Things like that just defy any attempt to fully summarize their experience in imagery or text. This waterfall in southern Oregon or Washington (I can’t remember) was one such time. I probably took around 40 photos while visiting the falls, and yet never really share most of them. I enjoy more so the memory of the ferns and the mist, the roar of the water spilling over rocks and flowing down the side of the cliff.

A photo can’t always do justice to the thing itself, but still I try to use other means. There are certain subjects that really do lend themselves solely to film photography, and sometimes you have to go with black and white or color. For this waterfall, this particular shot sticks with me because it’s the only one I took that captured the whole thing. Every other shot was closer up, capturing a spray of water, a fern, a pool at the base of the falls – and they’re fine. But none make me feel so small and insignificant as this one. There’s power in perspective, and that’s important.

Just a thought.