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….
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.
I took Hobbes outside this morning to do his business (he’s still hobbled up, so we can’t just let him out to do his thing in the backyard, we have to actually leash him up and walk him over to where he can pee), and it was about 6:30am, which this time of year is about an hour before sunrise. I glanced about for cars on the street (there were none), and when I looked up at the southern sky, to the left, my jaw dropped.
Orion the Hunter was there, in all his glory, with Canis Major to his right (or my left, as I was looking at him).
Orion has always been my favorite constellation, for various reasons…the winter stars are always so much shinier, for one thing; for another, Orion isn’t a stretch like some constellations are. Orion really looks like a figure of a man, maybe lifting a sword, hanging in the sky. Orion is big, taking up what seems like a full quarter of the sky as I gaze upon him. Looking at Orion I get a sense of mythology and vastness. And I know that Orion’s form contains even more wonders, like the Orion Nebula which is in his belt…and I know that if you follow the path of that belt to the right of Orion, eventually you run into the Pleiades, which are another of the sky’s great wonders.
Orion’s return to the sky always symbolizes to me the deepening of autumn and the coming of winter, and for me, those things are not unwelcome. Welcome back, Hunter! It’s good to see you.
Camera: Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra; processed in Snapseed.
I took this photo last Sunday while walking around the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center in West Seneca, one of this region’s underknown gems. It was a stunning morning, because the fog had not yet lifted and therefore the light was soft and diffuse and almost dreamy in places. And I am starting to wonder if maybe I’m starting, just starting, to get the hang of this photography thing.
The Wife and I honeymooned around New England: a couple of days on Cape Cod, a couple of days in Boston, and then we road-tripped through New Hampshire and Vermont on our way home. One thing I wish we’d had time for was a drive up to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.
Thanks to my favorite YouTuber, Post 10, I can at least see what the entirety of that drive is like. I wonder how many motorists every year don’t take sufficient care to cool their brakes on the way back down….
(Put that on fullscreen and watch it in the highest def your connection can manage. It gets more and more eye-popping as you go.)
You may remember me writing a few weeks ago about the Monarch butterfly caterpillar we found in the milkweed outside our front door, and its turning up again a few days later as a chrysalis clinging to the siding of our house.
Well, our friend kept hanging there for the better part of three weeks. The chrysalis gradually shifted from bright green and opaque to darker and somewhat translucent, until this past Saturday it looked like this:
If you examine the larger version of that photo, you can see the telltale markings of our butterfly friend’s wings inside the chrysalis.
This past Sunday I noted the chrysalis was still there as I departed for my morning’s photography walk…and when I returned less than three hours later, this is what I found on the side of the house.
Our friend stuck around a while–my understanding is that they have to let their wings dry before they can fly–and then I assume they departed for Mexico. I hope they enjoy safe travels; that’s a long trek.
What an exciting thing to see again…and for the first time!
