Last weekend was a good time to be out and about in Buffalo. We visited the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is the renamed, updated, and expanded Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Albright-Knox was always a favorite place of ours, and the museum got some good news back in the 2010’s at some point: a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Gundlach gave the museum a big pile of money, which led to the museum’s expansion. A whole new building was erected, new art was collected (the museum’s primary mission is modern art), and last year the newly re-done Buffalo AKG Art Museum was finally re-opened. (The COVID pandemic had a predictable effect on the project, that is to say, delaying it a few years.)
As one of her Christmas gifts, I bought The Wife a membership (for both of us, actually), and this past weekend we finally made it to the Buffalo AKG. And yes, it is amazing. It was always a wonderful museum, but the new addition and reorganization of the galleries makes it feel like something from a different city entirely.
The next morning–Sunday morning–I ventured down to Canalside in Buffalo, mainly choosing that destination because the weather had been warm and rainy all weekend, so my usual hiking haunts were likely to be unpleasantly muddy.
It is rapidly turning out that water is one of my favorite subjects for photography. It does so many fascinating things, and its relationship with light is particularly fascinating….
The top three are of Buffalo Creek as it flows past the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center. As the Creek tumbles over the rock beds there, it makes a nice bit of mild whitewater. The very first photo shows a phenomenon that whitewater boaters call a “hole”, when the water rushes over a rock in the stream and then falls back on itself, making a small water feature that looks like a pile of water flowing upstream.
The bottom two photos are of one of the many tiny streams that flow through Chestnut Ridge Park. The channel through which the stream is flowing in the first of these two photos is only about six or seven feet deep at that point, but just a few hundred feet downstream this small gully becomes a deep gorge that I assume to be at least fifty feet deep, if not more. The bottom photo is of one of the waterfalls that this stream plunges over. Note the ice crystals covering the far wall of the gorge, where the winter sun never shines….
At Chestnut Ridge last Sunday, I turned around as I headed for the hiking trail and noticed just how much crosswalk signage they have there. Safety first! (I am not mocking or complaining. This is the busiest part of one of Erie County’s biggest and busiest parks, and there are always lots of families and children about.)
“In case of emergency, the exits are here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here-here – anywhere! Keep your hands and arms inside the carpet!”
For a long time I’ve wanted to go down to Canalside, a sort-of public commons area on the Inner Waterfront in downtown Buffalo, to take photos of the people ice-skating on the rink there. I finally did just that last week, and while downtown I took the Metro Rail up to the Theater District and then walked back down Main Street to Canalside, where I took a few more pictures of skaters, as a couple of hours had passed by then.
Here are some of the resulting photos.
More, including expandable versions of these photos, available in this Flickr album.
As you can see, the light that day was gray, diffuse, and overcast–which is some great light to shoot in. (So far in my photography journey, I am not being choosey about the light I choose to shoot in or not to shoot in; I need to figure out how all the light works, so I don’t let the light be a factor in whether I go out or not. Now, as the day went on, the gray misty air eventually shifted into actual drizzle, which I probably should not have been out in, given the one substantial fault of the camera I bought: its lack of weather sealing. The camera was wetter than I would have liked by the time I finally got back to the car. Note to self: take the camera bag with you on days like this!
I also couldn’t help noticing, as I always do when I’m on Main St. in downtown Buffalo, that the city is on Year Thirty of feeling like it’s going to wake up and be a proper city oh, any day now. Of course, it hasn’t happened yet; there are still too few people and too few businesses down there to make for really interesting street photography. But hey, I’m not losing hope.
December has not been a good month for photography. The weather has been incredibly reliable this month: on any day when I have time to get outside someplace and walk about and take photos, the weather has been absolute garbage. And unfortunately, as much as I love my Lumix FZ1000ii, my biggest knock on it is that it has no weather-sealing.
But on Christmas Eve I did finally get out to Knox Farm even though it was misty and damp. Here are a few results:
I was at Knox Farm State Park the other day, and a theme that emerged in that day’s photography was “Fallen Giants”. I took a lot of photos of fallen trees and decaying stumps. I’m of the view that trees don’t stop being beautiful for not being in the ground anymore. The beauty of the woods lingers.
Erie County’s Chestnut Ridge park is one of my favorite places and has been for years. This park, larger than New York City’s Central Park, is set on the side of one of the higher hills to the south of Buffalo, and it is dominated by streams and gorges and beautiful meadows and one large hill that’s the regions preeminent spot for sledding when there’s snow…and there are even a few waterfalls.
One such waterfall is particularly beloved, not just because it’s beautiful in itself, but because there’s a hollow spot worn into the shale bed over which it drops, and from this hollow spot leaks a small flow of natural gas. This gas burns with beautiful golden light that prances and dances behind the flow of the water. (Sometimes it goes out, but it easily re-lit.)
The approach to the Eternal Flame Falls is not super-easy, but it’s not super-difficult either–and it’s better now that the deep descent into the gorge has been tempered by the addition of stairs. It used to be that you had to descend sharply down the wall of the gorge (I’m not sure of the height of the descent, but I think it’s at least a hundred feet at that point) by a root-covered trail, but now you descend the stairs. The walk along the gorge floor is still occasionally tricky, at times even requiring one to step in the stream (albeit in a spot where the depth is very manageable), but it’s absolutely worth it as one finally comes around the last bend and stands before the waterfall.
Along the way there is another waterfall in the side of the gorge, but this isn’t the one we’re here to see:
But finally, there it is:
As luck had it, when I arrived at the Eternal Flame Falls, I was alone there. For a full ten minutes, maybe fifteen, I was entirely alone: just me and the sound of the water tumbling down that shale wall, with the golden light magically flickering there. I don’t know if that’s because the weather was cold, or if it’s deep enough into fall that such outings aren’t as popular as in summer, or…well, who knows. I was alone.
The one other time I’ve gone to the Flame, I had Cane with me, and it was a warm summer day, so there were lots of people there. In fact, Cane and I arrived just as guy was proposing to his girlfriend. (She said yes.) There was a feeling that day of “Get up there and take your picture of the Flame because it’s someone else’s turn in a minute” that I managed to completely avoid yesterday. In fact, no one else came until I was already making my exit. I took my time with my camera, composing my shots and deciding what angles to take. I got some closeups of the grotto with the Flame in it, and I took some wider shots of the entire cataract, also using shutter-priority to get the soft-flow look that is so popular with water photography.
