The Artful Engineer

For the last two weeks I have been promising that the blog would go to the beach and here we are! Well…the image above doesn’t look like a beach, of course, but is right next to one: this is a petite little slot canyon carved into the beach’s cliff. (My wife reads this blog and she has banned me from slot canyons, so I need to point out that (a) I visited this place prior to the ban and (b) it is only about 100′ long so I would be promptly washed onto the beach in a flash flood anyway.) We have all seen slot canyon photos from the desert southwest resplendent in reds and oranges and yellows and sometimes even purples, but I have never seen one like this with the walls all covered in rich green moss and ferns. With the waterfall barely visible between the canyon sides in the distance, the image gives the feeling of being a jungle explorer. That sense of actually being inside the canyon, rather than just looking at it, is in large part due to the ultra-wide angle lens which includes the walls close on either side.

Once you moved further up to the waterfall, this was the rather spectacular scene that awaited:

Although the first place you look in this image is the waterfall and vivid green next to it, but I am particularly grateful for the little cascade in the center of the image. It is small, but at the center of lines coming from all directions: the waterfall above, the log, and the base of the two walls. The large black rocks in the creek itself also give a nice sense of depth as they recede towards the cascade. The reflections on those rocks give them just enough prominence to be noticed. In my mind, this image would work well on a wall because it is graphic enough to be eye-catching and complex enough to merit looking at for a long time.

The next two images are fun little groupings of limpets. Both images are focus stacks to increase the depth of field. In the first, the limpets blend nicely into the sandy-looking rock and seem to share its texture:

In the second they are on a very different glossy black rock that is picking up a lot of nice blue sheen from the reflected sky:

That same reflected blue sheen is visible on this group of black rocks on the beach nearby, but these rocks look much more recently split from whatever larger rock they were once a part of, especially the one on the left:

Without that reflected sky, these would likely devolve into a shapeless dark mass. The surfaces that are angled to the right are also picking up some warm reflected light from the sun in that direction; if I had noticed that at the time I would have tried taking a tighter shot of that boulder on the right that contrasted the two sides.

If you are wondering about that warm sun, this is what it looked like six minutes after I took the image above:

I kept hoping that the color in the sunset would intensify, but it really never lived up to its potential. Still, like the monochromatic look of the image above and especially the glow around the rocks themselves. We waited patiently for another half-hour and this next image was about as colorful as it got:

Nothing intense, but I like the peaceful look of this blue hour image. It was nice just to stand and watch the daylight slowly fade away. A beautiful scene all around.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s images and the next two weeks will also feature the beaches of Vancouver Island.