Rivendell

We’d gone to Portland for the Japanese Garden, and friends came down from Seattle to meet us, so the first couple of days went looking for waterfalls and hikes out along the Columbia River Gorge instead. Multnomah was the one I most wanted, and we got there early on a clear autumn day with a steady trickle of people rather than the crush it usually draws.

The association came to me standing in front of it. Peter Jackson’s wide shot of Rivendell in Fellowship has the same combination of drama and architecture — enormous falling water with a delicate bridge strung across the middle of it — and I couldn’t shake it while I was setting up. The gorge was dark enough that early to let me run half a second without a filter, which is how the water came out as ribbon rather than spray.

There’s an edit in this that aligns with the philosophy you can read about on my About page. The Benson Bridge was under repair when we visited and had plywood hoarding and orange safety netting fixed along it, and I took all of that out afterwards, panel by panel. We walked up onto the bridge once I’d finished shooting, so I know exactly how much of it I removed.

The Gorge was the detour, really — the actual reason for the trip was a couple of days later, at the Portland Japanese Garden, in Forest Bathing.