House of the Sun

The trail in runs through a bamboo forest, and it was windy that day. We'd never been in bamboo in the wind. The stalks knock against each other, a hollow wooden sound, dozens of them at once and none of them in time. Years later that's still the thing I remember first about this hike.

I shot the whole fall as an eight-frame panorama, and then I looked at what I actually had. The top was blown out against a flat overcast sky. The bottom had wind moving the vegetation, which turned to mush at any exposure long enough to smooth the water. What was left was the middle, and the middle was the picture anyway. Bright green moss on wet black basalt, a rust band cutting across the right wall, and the main flow braiding down the center with a handful of loose threads running the rock beside it.

I worked through a range of exposure lengths before settling on 0.8 seconds. Long enough to pull the water into ribbons, short enough to keep some structure in it instead of flattening it to a white smear. There was mist coming off the fall but not enough to be a problem. Shot at 120mm.