A Black & White Waterfall

Do you see in color or black & white when you approach a waterfall? Putting my day job (i.e., lawyer) hat on, the answer is: “It depends.”

I recently went to Tom Branch Falls to see if I could improve on this photograph.

Tom Branch Falls, Spring

A recent critique provided the useful feedback that the photo was good but could be better. The top was overexposed and undersaturated. It needed a polarizing filter. The truncated limb across the top was distracting.

Unfortunately, that do over will have to wait. There just wasn’t enough waterflow in late summer. It wasn’t a trickle, but it wasn’t much more. I’ll try it in the fall and again next year in the spring.

That’s okay because what caught my eye this trip was a cascade at the lower left. My eye took in the marked contrast among the flowing water, the wet rocks, the green leaves, and the dark cave-like area behind the cascade. Those tones instantly made me think of monochrome. So, I looked at the sun’s position and the time and decided to come back the next day a few hours before sunset.

The bottom of any waterfall is usually in a valley. The good news is that even bright light can be directional in that type of geography. You just have to be there at the right time because the light is usually right for only a fleeting time. For this photograph, I needed the sun high enough that it would hit the bottom of the fall—my cascade. If I were late, the sun would have dropped a little in the sky and would focus its light on the area above what I wanted to photograph.

As it turned out, I got there right on time the next day and had about a 20-minute window of light. Here's the result of that vision and planning.

Tom Branch Falls, Detail

I hope you like it. I sure did. I added it to my website and printed it 20 x 30 for my Louisville law office. It reminds me every morning how much I love returning to the Deep Creek area of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

And, to answer the “it depends” question at the start of this blog, I’ll work in color when I go back in the fall.