And now, a Photo #4

The Wife and I just got back yesterday from a long weekend in Rochester, Ithaca, and the Finger Lakes. We have been going there more or less annually (we missed a couple of years because of reasons) since 2007. This is one of a few photos I took of Taughannock Falls from that trip.

I took that photo on a Kodak EasyShare C633. No, I didn't remember that; in fact, even back then when we owned that camera, I couldn't have told you what model it was beyond it being a Kodak. Luckily, when I uploaded the photo to Flickr way-back-then, even then it had the EXIF data, so that's how I know what I shot this on. (Settings, if you're wondering--even though this was a cheap 6-megapixel point-and-shoot where you can't really change any settings at all--were f/2.7, 6mm (that focal length boggles my mind), 1/127sec, and ISO80.)

Looking at this photo now, I think...it's not at all bad, though it's certainly nothing great. The colors are muted and the highlights--particularly the sky--are blown out. I've taken a number of identical photos, but better photos, each year since. (Each year that we've gone, anyway.) Sometimes the light is good, sometimes less so; sometimes there's a nice amount of water going over the brink, sometimes, not so much. One year upstate NY--here taken to mean "Everything west of the Hudson and north of Yonkers"--was in a drought all summer, and there was barely a trickle going over Taughannock. That year it was literally looking at a cliff. One year we couldn't approach the lower viewpoint because a big wedding party was occupying the whole thing for photos; another year we literally arrived for a wedding. (I took photos of that. I wonder if the couple ever found them...when I shared them online I posted something like "Contact me, I'll send you prints for free!) That year it was raining, so the wedding took place under umbrellas. It was a small wedding: the couple, the officiant, and two witnesses.

We didn't even plan on seeing Taughannock Falls that year, because I honestly didn't know where it was. I knew it existed, but for some reason I thought it was farther east--north of Binghamton, maybe. We were driving along on our way to Ithaca, having decided on that destination because we looked up things to do and learned that Ithaca had something called "Apple Harvest Festival", when suddenly there's a sign: "Taughannock Falls Overlook, 800 feet". I barely had time to explain to The Wife why I was suddenly braking and turning onto this steep road up into the hills. We've been going back ever since, and we've even been there a few times in winter.

I like to think that I managed to take a photo at least this decent is a sign that I had a good eye even back then. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here, after all...when your subject is Taughannock Falls or something similar, taking a bad photo is quite a challenge. Even so, I do see hints here of what I do in my own photography to this day. I have the main waterfall, the subject, just slightly off center, and I have the treeline set up as a nice leading line. Yes, 98 percent of the work was done for me here before I ever showed up...as it has been every since. But we all start somewhere, don't we?

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Exeunt,
--K.