a little wild   (a small slice of wildlife)

I’ve been posting a *lot* of flowing water photos. This set is a twist on that genre that I’ve never really seen done before.

My issue with a lot of time exposure photos of flowing water is that they’re a long enough exposure to completely smooth out the flow, creating an illusion of utter calmness, but hiding the vitality and boisterousness of the flow. The little droplets playing around are what cause this, but they don’t usually come out in a photo — the eye can register smaller details that hide from most cameras. This has to be recorded by the right shutter time: too slow, as mentioned, smooths everything out, while too fast freezes everything. I want a sort of impressionistic feel to the photos, where you can recognize individual elements but also see that they’re in motion. Showing motion isn’t always easy in a still photo!

As mentioned, I recently bought a Laowa 24mm macro probe lens. This has a few unique properties: it’s a macro lens that can focus with a few millimeters of the subject; it’s very narrow; it’s waterproof. I decided to try to take closeup photos of the stream, and especially places where the smooth, laminar flow becomes chaotic and turbulent. It may be useful (or not) to realize that these are mostly Straight Out Of Camera photos.

In addition, when I take this kind of photo, I especially like to establish an “anchor” in the photo: something that clearly belongs to the solid world, to play off the time exposure, so the photo lands in the zone somewhere between representative and abstract.

There ended up being so many possible photos it was difficult to choose. It seemed almost blasphemous to discard so many, as if rejecting nature’s creativity, but there’s only so much space!

Let’s see if these photos are successful! Let’s start off with a view of the area I took most of the photos, to provide some context while you see the more abstract ones. In that little snap, there lie worlds.

This one was taken completely underwater, of the bubbles in the turbulence under the surface: