Achieving Flow
Rushing water always does it for me. The sight and sound is powerful—yet soothing at the same time. I’ve tried using photography to express this feeling for decades. But the results kept falling short. They didn’t emote how I felt and were just representations of what happened to be in front of the lens.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve returned to places that had moved me, slowed down, reflected on what I was feeling, and experimented with techniques. The triptych below comes as close to expressing how waterfalls and rapids make me feel as I’ve yet achieved.
Getting here wasn’t easy. For a long time, I thought this photograph of Deep Creek in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park did it.
I like this one, but I received some good advice when I shared it with peers in the fotoCom community: Tell a story by making it part of a triptych.
So, I recently went back to Deep Creek and just hung out for a while playing with compositions and even trying a little Intentional Camera Movement (ICM). The real challenge that day was working between groups of tubers and avoiding the children coming down the creek.
The first try I came up with was vertical.
Friends and family gave me some good advice:
the top photo was not recognizable as a rapid;
the bottom-left to top-right diagonal of the top photo conflicted with the horizontal lines of the other photos; and
the specular highlights in the middle photo didn’t fit well with the more painterly look of the other two.
The best part of this advice is that it forced me to realize that no one saw what I had wanted them to see. To me, the vertical triptych started with the shaded water at the bottom, then moved to the sunlit stream, and ended with the cloud-like rapid at the top. Others didn’t see that; I had fallen short of telling the story I wanted to tell.
Good communication is a key to life and that applies to art as well. Art is a conversation between the artist and audience. My language for that conversation is photography. Composition, tones, colors, lines, and other formal elements are the grammar. My goal as a visual artist for this triptych is to inspire the viewer to share my love of the calming power of a mountain stream.
Taking that advice to heart, I started thinking that since the stream flowed from left to right, a horizontal triptych in that direction might work. I also decided to go from sharp & representational to ICM & abstract. And, I rotated the ICM photo of the rapids to make it horizontal. Here’s that effort.
After looking at this iteration for a few days, I spotted two issues. First, the left and center photos are too similar. Second, mixing sharp photos with ICM doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps jumping between representational and abstract confuses the viewer. The middle and right photos worked but the one on the left didn’t. It also seemed to me that the middle photo should be the left photo, thus starting the flow sequence.
So, I went back to the drawing board and looked through my catalogue for a photo to connect the two. That turned out to be the middle photo in the triptych at the top of this article. Interestingly, I hadn’t really noticed that shot on my first review of that day’s pictures. It needed a context before it caught my eye. That’s the same way that one may not understand the significance of an early plot element until the end of the novel.
Soon, you’ll be able to see these three photos framed on my wall. And, I still have the photo of the sparkling, swirling water at Deep Creek to combine into its own triptych.