IronMan Wisconsin - Swimmers

Niagara Falls Before & After

I decided to post the before and after - first one with no processing except the crop. Handheld, 1/4s, f/13, ISO 200, 8x ND.

This place had a hush and a roar at the same time - innocent and mesmerizing but also powerful and deadly.

In one place it was quite strange to stand 3 feet from where the water quietly glided over the edge.

I tend to not do a lot of post-processing, but I'm not a "purist" either. With artistic images, I don't have qualms about doing moderate or extreme things to an image to achieve a desired effect. I should experiment more than I do, just to see what's possible.

Niagara Falls

This is *way* more processing in Lightroom (very light original image + recovery, blacks, vibrance) than I usually do.

I just felt like it, I like the resulting mood. This is not what I shot, but somehow it represents what I felt.

As a family we only spent a couple hours in the area. I could easily spend a week or two shooting in this place, with all the light, mist, water, lines, and gravity. It felt powerful!

And we made some interesting demographic observations about the other tourists. Ask me sometime. :-)

Horses

I've had several opportunities to shoot horses (with a camera) over the past few weeks. They're such beautiful and intelligent animals.

I have lots more editing to do but here are a couple "hortraits" and one of a very friendly interaction between a horse and a dog, they just nuzzled for a while.

Passion and Imagination

I have several passions. They change over time, they do ebb and flow with some sort of tide and timing.

One of the staying-power lasting passions for me after 46 years is for the visual arts, specifically photography: recording glimpses of things which represent other deeper things.

Like any healthy passion pursuit, there are many aspects of and outlets for this passion of mine. I like that.

I make images / photographs almost every day. Some are casual and careless; others are intentional and serious.

On the days I don't make them, I definitely consume images, taste them, ponder them, dream of making them, refine my mental framework about visual images.

My worst nightmare would be to become blind, I sometimes think. But in a strange way, I would probably accept even blindness (just as every person who is blind must do), and I think my passion for the visual would not go away, it would just adapt.

Much of our vision is imagination. We see a ball, but we imagine childhood, play, innocence, leisure, competition, cohesion, teamwork, or perhaps many other things. We even imagine things that are not possible to see, triggered by the things we see.

If we were to lose our sight, we'd still have imagination, which spans much broader and deeper than physical sight.

Imagination is a form of faith: wondering, hoping, believing, conjuring, placing trust in what might be even if we don't exactly see it.

There's so much mystery in this realm of sight and imagination that I expect I'll never lose my passion for photography. It's poetry for the eyes; and when poetry really moves you there's no explanation, there's only mystery.