New River, Brooks Falls, West Virginia

(Click image to enlarge)

When I first saw this scene I wanted to photographically distill the image down to its essence. To do that I excluded the river banks to avoid a sense of scale. A small aperture and a neutral density filter were used for a long exposure time to eliminate the visual noise of all of countless small ripples and splashing water droplets. Larger water contours that persist due to the river's flow remain in a smoothed or averaged form. The only fine detail in the photograph exists in things that did not move during the exposure. Lastly I processed the image in black and white to remove the distraction of color.

If one looks closely there are a two hints regarding the scale of the scene. The least obvious but most telling hint is the Canada geese in the upper right side of the photograph. They are more easily seen in the larger version of the image, which can be viewed by clicking on the image above. I noticed that the geese were not moving much and I captured more than 40 exposures, one after another, in hopes of getting one in which some of the geese could be easily recognized by those curious enough to look. It seemed to me that leaving a viewer wondering about certain properties of a scene, like scale, with no possible way to figure it out, was either pointless or cruel.

The other hint regarding scale is deceptive. Near the center of the photograph is a piece of wood. With absolutely no explanation of the photograph, a friend said the image led him to think that the scale of the scene is vast, "except the branch sitting about mid photo gives away the scale". In fact the "branch" is a tree trunk, and he had not noticed the geese. For anyone who has read this far and is still left wondering, from bottom to top the image covers a distance of roughly 1650 feet (503 meters or 0.3 mile). The lens focal length used was 47mm, which approximates normal unaided human vision. The New River is very wide at this point.