The Artful Engineer

For the next few weeks I am going to circle back to Alabama and fill in a few entries that got squeezed out by the Yorkshire trip. We’ll start with Desoto State Park in far northeast Alabama. The part is divided into two disjoint pieces: the main section with the campgrounds (where Google Maps will send you) and the much smaller piece five miles north that features Desoto Falls (where the staff at the main park will send you when you inexplicably can’t find the falls there). The river is shown on maps as West Fork Little River.

Desoto Dam is just above the falls themselves and is surprisingly photogenic if you work at it a bit. The water pouring over the top on either side of the central structure, above, is visually striking. And there is a great color pallette, too. I’m not sure what the function of the open square in the base is, but the composition is so much stronger with that high contrast focal point, so I will happily exploit its presence.

Further along the dam to the right there is a log that has gone over the top and is wedged diagonally between buttresses. I also have some compositions that show this section in the context of more of the dam. Those work well, too, but seemed too similar to the image above, so I decided to include just this image focusing on the one section.

This next image shows the cascades and falls below the dam. There’s a lot of fallen trees waiting their turn to be swept over the falls that make things a little cluttered above the cascade, but the focus stays on the moving water. This image turned out a lot better than I thought it would, and has a nice energy from upper left to lower right. The bright flowing water and the dark central pool also make a nice contrast. I initially brightened up the greens and yellows on the far side and, while they did look better that way, they competed for attention when they clearly weren’t the focus of the image. In the end, I actually darkened them just a bit.

Upstream of the dam itself, the river was calmer and wider, as one would expect, which made for some nice reflections of the spring foliage. Unfortunately, I will not have the opportunity to return to this scene this fall, but I would love to repeat this image across the seasons:

The footpaths around the falls included these steps that, inexplicably, were decorated with what looked to be the remains of a smashed Tiffany lamp:

The uncropped full frame of the image below includes the entire tree on the right hand side. Looking at the image on the computer left me unsatisfied, so I cropped away the left side, leaving the entire dock and the entire tangled tree. This put the blue chairs way over on the left side of the frame, but the tree really can’t carry the attention it should if placed in the center. Finally it occurred to me that the story here was not about the tree, but the blue chairs, waiting for summer weekend getaways. Since the chairs stand out so strongly due to their color, they retain the focus and everything else is context. This is essentially an environmental portrait of lonely deck chairs. The barely-visible hut and the canoe on the dock complete the story, and the unruly tree adds a touch of back-to-nature wildness to the scene.

I suspect the reason I didn’t get around to posting a blog about this outing during my first wave of Alabama posts this past summer is that I didn’t think I had much to work with. But looking at them now, I am pretty happy with the resulting set. That is a tangible benefit of this blog for me: it gives (and sometimes forces) me to revisit images, and sometimes there are things that I didn’t initially appreciate.

Thanks for following along!