The Artful Engineer

A long-time friend, Erik, visited from Massachusetts last weekend. Over the years, we have been on a number of notable photographic adventures, including exploring Ragged Top in the Ironwood Forest National Monument northwest of Tucson. (That’s a very old post, so I apologize for it’s different look and feel; beautifying the prehistoric posts on this site is in my backlog.) After picking him up from the Denver airport, we drove over to Boulder Falls on the recommendation of my friend, David, who I met photographing the aurora over Pawnee Buttes back in May.

Being a warm Saturday afternoon, there were a lot of people enjoying Boulder Creek at every pullout along the road. Below the falls themselves, it was the same: lots of people enjoying the water. Like anywhere else, avoiding the weekends has advantages.

Since there were so many people in the water, that really forced me up close to the falls to keep them out of the frame. Even so, I was sitting on a big log that would shift around whenever someone climbed on or off of it. I eventually got the tripod firmly placed despite this and was able to use my wide tilt-shift to capture the image above. I like the way that the emphasis is on the colorful rocks; the falls themselves are more of a supporting element. There is also a rainbow; it is not very prominent against the rocks, but does add to the color.

In the second image, I moved in very close with a very wide focal length to focus on just those rocks, ignoring the falls altogether. There’s a lot of nice textures in the image, and I particularly like the way that the yellow and green algae shows through the water in the center. I probably should have tried a slower shutter speed, too, just to see what it looked like, but my physical position was awkward and uncomfortable so I wasn’t as thorough as I should have been. That said, I like this version that I do have.

I also took some narrower details of the falls. My favorite was this next image, which has an abundance of energy:

The falls themselves were fun—I always love running water—but there was also this fascinating bit of mining detritus that had washed over the falls long ago from somewhere upstream:

There were lots of image possibilities for this wreckage of the past. I gravitated towards going very wide, in the end settling on the 9mm, which let me photograph from inside the assembly:

One advantage of the thing being so rusty is that even though it was smooth enough to pick up some blueish sheen from the sky, it was far too rough to reveal my reflection in the previous image despite the lens being very close to it.

Images that are in direct sunlight tend to have warm highlights (lit by the sun) and cool shadows (lit by the sky), and very often when I process images I try to emphasize and exploit that contrast. This next image was pretty much the opposite: the highlights were lit by cool blue sky and the shadows, while certainly not lit by the sun, are a very warm color because they are rusty. Rather than fight it, I doubled-down and emphasized the cool lighting on the main subject. Combined with the out of focus foreground elements, I think it works:

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my fisheye with me, so that will definitely be in my bag on a return visit. I am also interested to see what this place would look like after a winter storm, so perhaps those two things will coincide.

I also want to know where this washed down from. It was a pretty big piece of debris, so there must be a lot more somewhere upstream.

I’ll wrap up this post with a more humorous image. When I broke out the 9mm, I quickly noticed that I had my foot very prominently in the frame. That is easy to do with such a wide lens pointed down:

I have a footless version of this image, too, and it is probably worth processing. Perhaps it will find its way to being a feature on the home page, which I have started using to share overflow images from blog posts. I did swap out the featured image there, by the way, so check it out.

Thank you for visiting!